Talking Drupal #525 - Drupal for Designers

Oct 20, 2025

Join Dave Pickett, a tech and design expert at CivicActions, and Kelly Smith, a seasoned design and content strategist, as they dive into the world of Drupal for Designers. They explore the challenges designers face, the benefits of Site Builder certification, and effective alert design using the Sitewide Alert module. Hear about practical collaboration tips for designers and developers, and discover how certification boosted their confidence in managing Drupal projects. Gain insights on the importance of bridging design and technical skills in the Drupal community.

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ADVICE

Configure Alerts For Real Requirements

Check module features for dismissal, scheduling, and polling when using Sitewide Alert to match real needs.
Martin and Dave confirm Sitewide Alert supports dismissible alerts and refresh capabilities.

INSIGHT

Polling Trade-Offs For Site Alerts

Frequent polling for alerts (e.g., 15s) gives immediacy but increases load; caching and CDNs can mitigate impact.
Martin and Nic discuss trade-offs between immediacy and resource cost for critical alerts.

INSIGHT

Customizable Yet Counterintuitive

Drupal's configurability is a major strength but it can feel counterintuitive to designers used to cohesive UI patterns.
Kelly Smith found settings split across menus broke her designer mental model and slowed handoffs.

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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

Topics

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

Resources

Guests

Kelly Smith - kesmith Dave Pickett - civicactions davidmpickett

Hosts

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

MOTW Correspondent

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?