Designing Effective Alerts

Today we are talking about Drupal for Designers, site builder certifications, and getting more designers in Drupal with guests Dave Pickett & Kelly Smith. We'll also cover Sitewide Alert as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/525

• Designing for Drupal: Challenges and Insights
• Site Builder Certification Journey
• Starting the Journey: Taking the Course and Exams
• Understanding Drupal: Post-Certification Insights
• Challenges and Complexities in Drupal
• Team Collaboration and Training Benefits
• Practical Applications and Personal Projects
• Preparing for the Certification Exam

• Talking Drupal #490 - Drupal Contrib First
• Book: Designing Content Authoring Experiences
  • Greg Dunlap
• Acquia Training: Drupal Site Building
• Design to Drupal: Bridging the Handoff

Kelly Smith - kesmith Dave Pickett - civicactions davidmpickett

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Stephen Cross - stephencross.com stephencross

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to post and manage sitewide alerts on your Drupal website? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Sitewide Alert
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Oct 2019 by Chris Snyder (chrissnyder) of Phase2
  • Versions available: 2.2.1 and 3.0.1 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 25 open issues, 9 of which are bugs against the 3.x branch
• Usage stats:
  • 4,866 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, you can create Sitewide Alerts as a new entity type
  • By default, alerts are displayed at the top of the page sitewide regardless of theme, but there is an option to exclude admin pages and an optional submodule will render the alerts in a block that you can place in a specific place that might meet your site's needs better. There is also an option to specify that an alert should only be shown on specific pages, and can be configured to be shown and hidden at specific times
  • It's worth mentioning that alerts are dynamically inserted into the pages by front end code that checks a custom endpoint on a configurable schedule, so new alerts can be displayed without waiting for a new page to load. And this also means that changes to the alerts won't invalidate the cached versions of your site pages
  • You can also configure a set of styles, effectively CSS classes, that can be applied to your alerts. Sitewide Alerts are also fieldable and themable, so you have virtually unlimited ability to tailor them to the specific needs of your site
  • A while back I made my own module for implementing alerts, called Alerts, but it lacks a number of important features available in this module, particularly dynamically loading alerts as they're published or changed
  • I also thought that Sitewide Alerts would be interesting to talk about today because one of our guests, Dave Pickett, published his own companion project called USWDS Alert that aligns the display of the alerts with the USWDS design system. So Dave, thank you for contributing this, and what can you tell us about your experience using Sitewide Alerts?