Talking Drupal #525 - Drupal for Designers

Stephen: Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today are Dave and Kelly. Kelly has spent over a decade in the design arena and specializes in content design strategy. She uses her past experience from teaching and training to help break down complex workflows into user-friendly designs. She's been a designer of websites built in Drupal for eight years, and one of the best decisions she's made was diving into the site builder.

Course. Dave is fascinated by technology and creativity, and as a child, he took apart toys and rebuilt them, and he still does this as an adult. Welcome to the show guys, and thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us.

Kelly: Thank you.

Nic: I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development, and today my co-host is as a treat for the second week in a row, Stephen Cross, founder and host at Talking Drupal. Welcome back.

Stephen: A generous calling it a treat to, I'm happy to be here. Thanks, Nick.

Nic: And now, to talk about our module of the week, let's turn it over to Martin, Anderson-Clutz a principal solutions engineer at Acquia, and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules and recipes of his own.

Before we dive in, Martin, where are you joining us from? Hi, I am joining you

Martin: from Vienna, for Drupal in Europe.

Nic: Yeah, I, I watched the Driesnote this morning and, and definitely enjoyed all the demos that you've done, and pretty excited. Looking forward to talking about it more when you get back.

Martin: Thanks. I mean, I, I got to be sort of the voice of those demos, but there was a lot of people that put a lot of work into making those come off as seamlessly as they did.

So kudos to the larger team. That was a big part of what those were able to show.

Nic: I I, I'm always curious when I see these demos, I, I think I know the answer, but how, how much demo magic was there and how much was it like it's part of the RC one?

Martin: So, I mean, speaking honestly, I think there was actually a lot less sort of demo magic this year than there was a year ago for Barcelona.

So I think a lot of what, what you see is, is really the way those things will work to some degree, you know, like the engineering of the prompt is obviously gonna be really critical to the quality of what AI will return. So for some of those examples, but like there was nothing where I had to sort of like retry it multiple times and then sort of cherry pick the best one.

So. Awesome.

Nic: It's good to hear. So what do you have for us this week for Mar of Week?

Martin: Thanks Nick. Have you ever wanted to post and manage Sitewide alerts on your Drupal website? There's a module for that. It's called Sitewide Alert, and it was created in October of 2019 by Chris Snyder of phase two. It has 2.2 0.1 and 3.0 0.1 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11.

It is actively maintained and has both security and test coverage, and it has 25 open issues, nine of which are bugs against the three point x branch, which is all pretty good considering it's officially in use by 4,866 sites according to drupal.org. Now 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 min pages and an optional submodule, which will render the alerts in a block that you can place in a specific place that might better meet or better meet the needs of your particular site. 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 load. This also means that changes to the alerts won't invalidate the cache versions of your site pages.

You can also configure a set of styles, effectively, CSS classes that can be applied to your alerts. Site-wide alerts are also fieldable and teamable, so you can 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 U-S-W-D-S Alert that aligns the display of the alerts with the U-S-W-D-S design system. So Dave, thank you for contributing that back to the community.

And what can you tell us about your experience using sitewide alerts?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. I was like, wow, this is like the perfect module. 'cause I, it's one of the few things that I, I could actually talk about. So, I thought it was magic, but thank you for being intentional. Yeah, so this is a project that we've been working on at Civic Actions trying to model you know, Drupal contribute first.

So I believe our, our fearless leader, Steve Wt in terms of the, the module maintainer was actually on this very podcast talking about this effort. So we have a number of client websites that we work for that are government websites and that use Sitewide Alert or could use Sitewide Alert. And we wanted a way to make it, you know, very simple for that to adopt the US web design system, you know, kind of style for the front end presentation of those alerts.

And so that's been an ongoing internal initiative that would then, you know. Also show up on client sites. Once we've kind of got that, it's, it's still in, in the works. And of course always looking for more people to help out and contribute. So,

Nic: I guess one question I have is, is it configurable, the dismissal piece, because a lot of clients require some sort of cookie to set to dismiss it and some kind of logic to kind of invalidate the dismissal. If it's a new alert, does it kind of handle that piece as well, or.

Do you, do you need something else on top it? So

Martin: yeah. At least according to the product page, the answer to both questions is yes, you can optionally configure them to be dismissible. And then it does seem to, there does seem to be a capability where if somebody has dismissed an alert, a as on the back end, you can sort of refresh that so that people will see those alerts again.

Stephen: Okay. I'll, I'll have to check this out because this is a very common feature request and I've implemented it 17 different ways over the years. And if there's just an off the shelf way to do it, I mean, the, the only thing I would have to really dig into, I feel like aside from the feature set, is kind of the front end piece of it.

If it's pulling kind of frequently, that could be or if there's a, a bunch of them pulling frequently, that could be kind of a performance issue, but it's, you could probably cache that endpoint a lot easier than you can cache the whole page. So. I think it's a clever way to do it.

Martin: Yeah, exactly. And it's, I noticed that you can set the, the interval at which it will pull.

So you could say, I think the default it looks like is 15 seconds, but you could increase that or shorten that depending on the level of urgency you expect your site wide alerts to have, I suppose.

Nic: Yeah. 15 seconds feels very, very often. I mean, the truth, the truth, it's one of this is one of those, this is something I'd love to solve.

This is one of those struggles when you need those alerts, many times you need them immediately. Right? But checking every si 15 seconds for every single user on the site, for years on end, for the two times, two times a year, you need that is, is a huge amount of resources to be using. So I would have to, I would've to think about that.

I think this all depends on the nature of the site and the nature of the alerts.

Yeah, that's true. Some sites alert far more often.

Yeah. And I'm also wondering if that polling is something that you can turn on and off. So if you have an alert, you then turn it on, or is it just these ideas? It's polling all the time.

And like m Nick mentioned that two or three times a year, certainly you wouldn't wanna be polling if you're using alerts twice a year. Yeah,

Martin: yeah. It's tough. I I'm pretty sure it's pull. Whereas I feel like what you're describing, Steven, almost has more of like a push Yeah. Style thing where it's basically saying it's not actively checking and so you just want to wanna be able to sort of like push it out to them almost

Nic: see a web hook or something Right.

Where it's like, yeah, hey, if if this thing changes. Send this notification out and, but I mean it's, that doesn't work exactly. But yeah, something to think about.

Martin: I mean, I will say I've talked to higher ed institutions who wanted sitewide alerts and one of the examples that they spoke of was like an active shooter drill, which, you know, a higher ed institution to your point, may not need alerts very often.

I think the other example that they cited was like, maybe one of the buildings had lost power. So to let people know to go to other places, which obviously is gonna be much less urgent, but you can see where, you know, in that kind of a circumstance, you would definitely wanna make sure people had the information as quickly as possible.

So

Stephen: yeah,

Dave: that's,

Stephen: yeah, ab absolutely true.

Dave: I was going to say from a design perspective, you know, this is something we definitely talk about with clients right, how to use alerts effectively. And one of those considerations is using them only for things that are actually kind of emergency issues. But, you know, if you.

You know, government agency might have locations all around the country in different time zones, that when something happens, you need that person to be able to put that alert up, you know, and have it go up without having to do any sort of additional release or anything like that. Because yeah, an hour is too long.

15 seconds maybe, maybe 30 seconds, maybe two minutes. Right. Is fine. But yeah, those, those minutes do really start adding up. And whether that's, you know, a weather event or you know, a security event it's important.

Nic: Yeah. Yeah. And you can easily, especially if you can configure that, you can also probably pretty easily throw CloudFlare in front of it to help prevent, like have CloudFlare invalidate.

Even if you have CloudFlare invalidate every 30 seconds and you're requesting every 15 seconds, that'll always be cached in CloudFlare except for one, one hit. So. You're, you're still getting that amount of time. You're still doing the round trip, but the CN is kind of handling the brunt of that load. So it's definitely something to consider.

As always, Martin, you've found, you've managed to find a very on-topic module of the week. I appreciate your effort. If people wanted to connect a, suggest a module of the week, what's the best way for them to do that?

Martin: Always happy to have lively discussions about potential candidates or past modules of the week in the talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack, where folks can find me as man clue on all of the Drupal and social channels.

Nic: And one last thing, Martin, before I let you go, can you refresh my memory? What, what kind of bird was that? In the Southwestern Ontario Drupal camp from the people will hear in a second.

Martin: So it's actually a common loon in the beginning, and it's a Canada goose at the end, so different birds on each end.

Stephen: Okay. That's

Nic: what I

Martin: thought. Interesting.

Nic: Thank you so much, Martin. Enjoy DrupalCon.

And here's Martin to tell us about the Southwestern Drupal Camp.

Speaker: Join us in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada for the first ever Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp. On October 24th, we'll have a full day of informative sessions, free lunch and refreshments. Awesome networking opportunities, and more. Thanks to our generous sponsors. At Mission is free. Registration is now open.

Visit ssw dot drupal canada.org for more information.

Nic: Thanks, Martin.

And here's Arron to talk about the Drupal Camp Scotland, which I've heard good things about.

Speaker 2: Drupal Camp Scotland is back for 2025. Join us on Friday, the 7th of November in the historic city of Edinburgh for a full day of sessions, networking and an evening social event. For more details and to get your tickets, visit the camp website at Camp Drupal Scott.

Nic: Thanks, Aaron.

All right. Okay. Kelly, maybe we can start with you. I, if we're, as we're diving into our main topic, can you tell us what are the, from kind of a designer perspective, what are the biggest pain points or misconceptions for designers looking to design for a Drupal project?

Kelly: Sure. So one of the great benefits about Drupal is it's meant to be customizable.

You can choose who gets to see what you can choose, which permissions people have. You can match the site to your company or agency brand, which all goes really, really well in the mind of a designer. That's what we're, what we're here to do is create and craft those views and, and how things look and feel and, and read through your, through your website.

But I can't speak for all designers, but for me personally, there are times when Drupal is a little count, seems a little counterintuitive. Like, for as, as an example if I wanted to change like the logo or the favicon or my site, I do that under the appearance menu. But if I wanted to change the site name or slogan.

I would do that under the configuration menu and that like breaks my designer brain that they're not in the same location because to me they, that all seems like the, how it impacts the look and feel of the site. So I, I imagine my designer brain, those all being together in configurable in the same place.

So that was definitely a learning curve when I very first started out designing was trying to figure out where all of these different settings and, and options occurred so that I could design for them.

Stephen: Interesting. And Dave, anything to add to that?

Dave: Yeah, I mean, I think to echo what Kelly said, Drupal's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness in that it is infinitely customizable.

So right in, in addition to what Kelly mentioned, which is available in core, then you add on contributed modules, you add on custom modules, and when you walk into a site as a designer that's already been around for a few years, it can be really complex to understand how and what part of the overall Drupal configuration is creating the error message that you want to update.

For instance, like sometimes that is in a widget and sometimes that widget. Is something you can change or sometimes it's a widget that is built into the code of the module. 'cause they didn't really give you the option to overwrite certain error messages or, so it, it just because the complexity of any individual Drupal iteration, you kind of have to learn.

So, while you know, there is no one Drupal, there are as many Drupal as there are Drupal websites, I think compared to something like WordPress where like a lot of the things will be much more standardized across different things. That being said, right, like Drupal obviously is incredibly powerful because of that.

But that means you also need to be incredibly powerful as a designer to match that. I would say

Kelly: with great power come great responsibility.

Stephen: Some of the things you just mentioned in terms of the pain points are on the implementation side of implementing a design. I'm curious to know if you would consider Drupal to be difficult to design for.

Go ahead, Dave, and we'll, and we'll get to why right after that.

Dave: Yeah, I guess, so, I'll, I'll say also I have dealt with Drupal primarily in a decoupled context where interesting. I'm generally thinking about designing for Drupal as designing the editorial experience within in Drupal as opposed to designing a front end experience.

So for me, I'm usually using when I'm thinking about designing for Drupal or designing Drupal, I'm thinking about you know, people entering content and how we configure the site to match kind of the content. Model and content needs. And then front end presentation is a whole other thing. But that's just again, my Drupal experience, which isn't every Drupal experience.

Kelly: So for me it's, it, it's something, and it, it sounds simple, but like for in, in terms of like how out of the box, core Drupal under the hood comes, you know, like the help text. I would always as a designer, put that next to whatever widget entity content type it, it is focused on. And in Drupal it comes underneath.

Like for instance, if you have a text field, the help text comes underneath that text box, text field. And so when, one of the things that's sort of the learning curve, which is an easy fix, but does present a barrier when you're starting these designs for a front end site for it is retraining your designer brain to put that help content under, for example.

'cause that's, it's just, it makes for a faster handoff and, and better flow for the designs.

Stephen: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I like when I was, we were coming into this show today, I was thinking to myself, 'cause I'm not coming at this from a designer perspective. I'm not one, but I've worked with a number of designers and I'm, I've been trying to think about have I worked with designers that have never done anything in Drupal before?

And I think the answer to that is no. So, so I'm, I'm having trouble, like, looking at it, looking at it from their perspective because I kind of think of the designer's position to be like, working with the client, coming up with a design they're happy with and then implementing. But there's that knowledge in between of should a designer be presenting something to a client that they know is gonna be difficult or not the normal way to do it in Drupal.

And I, I see that, I can see how that knowledge would be very helpful too. Make the project go smoother to make the client see less friction to make the project come in on time.

Kelly: Yeah, and even with, you know, the contributed modules that I've worked with Steve work on, you know, it's, it's reduced that back and forth time already because I, I now have that knowledge of how it works, as it as it goes.

And, you know, while this in a beautiful designer's world might be a three step process, it's all

would have beautifully designed this three step process. Now I say, okay, so I know how this is gonna work in Drupal, so now I can design for that workflow. And it does speed that, speed that up.

Stephen: So it'd be safe to say that designers that are working or have experienced with Drupal aren't coming in with a blank slate for a new website.

Dave: Y Yeah, I mean, I think that's something I've seen as, you know, new designers join a project and it's their first time working with Drupal. A lot of that initial learning curve is just starting to understand what is up for change and what is kind of baked into a Drupal implementation. And you know, we always try to, whenever we're doing the design, whether that's a Drupal site or a, you know, non Drupal application that we're designing, bring engineering into the conversation early and often so that we're making sure we're not proposing anything that is literally impossible or you know, going to be extremely resource intensive and, you know, not the best way to do it.

So I think that's one of those things where, you know, that was. Really reinforced that existing best process for us. We, when we were designing Drupal interfaces and still figuring out what we could and could not change, was just getting that early and often feedback.

Stephen: Dave. Earlier you mentioned that you were doing design work for the backend, like the administrative side, and I hadn't really thought of it from that perspective.

I haven't done a lot of that kind of work. Whatever Drupal has given me, I just use unfortunate for my clients, I guess. There hasn't been a lot of attention paid by me in that area. I'm curious as to what kind of things or what kind of pain points you have on the editing side. In Drupal and what, what kinds of things you can do to solve those problems.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I want to call out a great book Designing Content, authoring Experiences by Greg Dunlap. You know, I think to the extent that there is an expert on kind of designing the experience for content editors within Drupal, you know, he's done a lot of great talks and presentations and kind of brought that together in a book of, so for people who are looking for more resources when I went to DrupalCon Pittsburgh a couple years ago, I attended every session that seemed like it was somewhat related to this to be like, how are you doing it?

How are you doing it? Is there like a way to have a cohesive design system within the admin experience of Drupal so that all the buttons are gonna look the same? Right. You know, try to. Have it at, at parity with like front end design systems that we're using in our decoupled experience. And basically what I found it is like that's, that doesn't exist, right?

Because the different aspects of the admin experience are controlled. So disparately, right? You've got your theme that's doing a lot of the, the work and heavy lifting, but then individual modules and form display things will have different settings here and some of those you can control or can't. And then you've got twig things doing something and that's consi all.

If you don't also have some kind of, you know, form alter doing JavaScript magic or something, I don't even know what those words mean. I just know that's what our engineers say sometimes. So, you know, I, I don't think that Drupal is really architected to make it easy to have a cohesive design. System really on the authoring experience. The front end is obviously geared very differently, but when we're talking really about designing that admin or authoring experience yeah, it's just, it doesn't seem like everything's kind of connected up and you have to do a lot of sleuthing an investigation

Stephen: and from a design perspective that sleuthing an investigation is happening in code and configuration and multiple places, which I think is, is part of the pain point.

Right. So where, where did the idea to get site certified site builder certified come from? Was it just a general progression? Like did it come from you guys? Where did this whole thought process start?

Kelly: I'll, I'll start. Again, throw a shout out to the, our, our contri and Drupal guru, Steve Wt. I had worked with him on a couple of contri modules. And you know, Steve, you and I, we were talking about this earlier, is how I found that I spent more time trying to figure out how Drupal worked, like out of the box so that I could design for it than that made me realize that like, that was the biggest blocker that I had was I didn't understand how it worked out of the box.

And so I was trying to, as, as Dave put, you know, create these beautiful designs that may have either been. Impossible. And sometimes were admittedly or would need a lot of customization for them. So I decided I was gonna take the course to remove that barrier for me as the designer. But in terms of our broader civic actions design team we actually had an OKR this year as a practice area.

One of our OKRs this year as a practice area, was that each designer receives a new certification. And given that, you know, at at civic actions we build primarily Drupal sites obtaining this certification was very intentional by our designers who went through the course to kind of establish our stake in the ground and, and now become those designers who also know Drupal.

So that's, that's where it came from for me. Dave, I'll, I'll pass it over to you to, to chat about you.

Nic: Yeah. Well, I wanna get, sorry, sorry, Dave, but before we do what is ok R.

Kelly: Oh, objective and key results. I'm sorry. It's like our goals for the year.

Stephen: Oh, for like employee evaluation type thing?

Kelly: Yes.

Stephen: Yes sir.

Sorry. Sorry, Dave. No, no problem. Sorry Dave, what do you, what do you got?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanna give big props to Kelly because she really took the initiative to set up our internal kind of study group. Going through this process together as a cohort of designers. I have been wanting to get the site builder certification for, you know, over a year and a half.

But I tried to do a internal professional development sprint with some of our engineers who were doing it and they were moving at a speed. That was way too fast for me, you know, especially because the first part of the aquia course is install a local instance of Drupal, which. No, I like, I, I, I still haven't done that.

And so, you know, there, there were some it was hard to kinda get over that and also, 'cause I wasn't really with people who were speaking my language, I kind of fell off the wagon. I, for me, the site builder certification, I knew all of the content. Right. I had at that point been doing configuration on, you know, client Drupal sites you know, merging PRS to update configuration, planning out entire content models.

I was doing all of the things that a site builder does but I just didn't have the official thing. So I had kind of learned from the school of hard knocks of how to do all the things in Drupal and even views, which are, you know. A whole thing, un themselves and that kind of stuff. And so for me it was really, I wanted to, you know, make sure that I hadn't missed anything, you know, that would've been covered in kind of like that, the course.

And then also just get it. But yeah, I, I had been putting, that was on my list for over a year and a half before I actually got it. And that it's really thanks to Kelly kind of setting up this structure where we met on a regular basis and, you know, gave ourselves homework and talked about what we were doing.

Kelly: Thanks, Dave. And I, I wanna add into that, that what was, one of the things that was really nice and fun about this group is we. Really ran the full gamut of Drupal knowledge. We had Dave there who is very familiar. We had a designer with us who had never, who was relatively new to civic actions, but had never actually even worked within a Drupal site.

So we, yeah, we, we ran the, the full gamut of it. And you know, Dave was talking about the, the homework and I, I used to be a teacher, so that's why I was assigning homework. But we really did take the modules and, you know, like break 'em into smaller chunks and, and we really did like it, it started out as sort of individual quests for all of us, but it came together as a group completion at the end.

So.

Stephen: And how many designers were there?

Kelly: We had seven designers I think.

Stephen: And did you all obtain the certification or a couple of you still working on it or,

Dave: Four of us have taken the, the exam and passed, and I think other people are waiting to schedule or for, you know, different reasons.

Stephen: Yeah. So Dave, you mentioned the course that you took.

What, what, what is, what are you referencing there?

Dave: Yeah, so this is the Acquia site Builder certification prep course. So it is on Acquia Academy, I guess, right? So this, 'cause it's the Acquia certification and so they have their own course. Some of our designers actually supplemented that course with a course from Drupal Eyes me or other kind of resources about site building.

But you know, most of us, what we followed was that main Acquia. Site builder certification course since it kind of teaches to the exam. And you know, that was our, our main kind of source. But we produced our own study guides afterwards where we filled in things that we had learned elsewhere you know, to kind of prep ourselves for the exam.

Stephen: And That's excellent. So you, so you took the course as a group Yes. Yes. Basically Exactly. And, and then also shared your notes and collaborated together to fill in the gaps. Any gap that you had, you shared that with someone else. That's, that's excellent.

Dave: Yeah. So it was really a study group, right. Like that, and that's what we.

Named our internal Slack channel okay. Study group. And you know, it was really different from the approach again, that I had experienced when there were some engineers who were doing this and they were doing site building theming and other certifications. So they were kind of blazing through site building in a month.

You know, we took a, a couple months, right. And, you know, really just like pasted and if somebody fell behind, that's okay, right? Like, this is where we're at and we're gonna keep talking. And, you know, people caught up and you know, really trying to have a open, collaborative approach that was not a sprint, but more of, you know, kind of a, a leisurely stroll down Drupal lane.

Stephen: So how long ago did this happen, this course? Did you guys take this course and started taking the exams?

Kelly: We started in April and we were done by the. 1st of July. Is that right around there? Yeah, that was

Dave: about when everyone had gotten through the course. And then, because I think I took my exam August, or you took yours in August?

Kelly: I took mine in August,

Dave: yeah. Yeah. So we've, it's been kind of a rolling process, right? Like some of us took the exam on the same day, others took it at different points, but so, yeah, it, it's been kind of a, a rolling process this year.

Stephen: So this is a recent, yeah, this is, this is very recent. I'm curious to know after taking the course, working together as a team, some of you being certified how has it helped you understand designing for Drupal at this point?

Like, what were the results or what have the results been so far? Maybe it's too early to really know but has it helped. I think that's good question.

Dave: For me, it was like one of those last little things like is there something I'm missing or is this really how everything is? And now I can cap say, Nope.

Everything that I thought was confusing about Drupal is. Confusing about Drupal, and it's not right. There's irreducible complexities in how things are done, and it wasn't like a gap in my knowledge. It was me being correctly confused about, you know, certain aspects. That yes, you can have a display of a view and you can also have a view that has a display.

And those are totally different things. For instance and, you know, so I, I feel really confident now in, in the fact that I can say what I know about Drupal and understand and point to and that, that, that was really helpful in that, that respect of just kind of being like, yep. I think like I, I am a site builder and I know as much as a site builder could be reasonably expected to know about Drupal.

Stephen: I, I will interject and say one thing though, I think be, I think part of it too, you said it reducible complexity of drup. And I'd like to contend, I have some, some points to contend with that. I think the truth, I think the truth is that Drupal is built by developers and for a long time that was their primary focus.

And so for example, Kelly, you mentioned, one of the first things you mentioned was that yeah, you changed the logo in in favicon and appearance and you changed the site name and slogan and site settings. And for me, like, because that's how I learned, it's like, yeah, of course. Like what do you mean that's confusing?

But the second you say that, it's like, that is really stupid, that they're in different places. Like it just absolutely is. The second thing, like what you were mentioning Dave, like some of the complexities around views or things like that. I think the, I think the, there's two or three related issues here.

One is we don't have enough UX or front end people contributing to core as a whole. Two.

Kelly: I just heard

Steve Wirt's,

ears and light bulb go on.

Stephen: Two, the barrier to entry to contributing to core is very high. And I think that's, I think that's directly related to one of the reasons why there's not as many front end designers.

Not that you don't put in hard work because you guys do. I mean, designing a good UX is beyond my skillset, but there's a whole layer of the open source piece of like pushing something up the hill to get it across the board and or across the line. And I, I think that being open and honest and talking about strategies to resolve that piece of it is, is lacking in general.

Nevermind just for front end designers and ux. And then, and then finally is. We're just not defining all these pa I think some people just like this is confusing. You get used to, once you get used to it, like a lot of the developers are, have been developers for a long time. They just get used to doing all these things and don't look for ways to improve it because they're more interested in fixing the code path or fixing a bug or something like that.

But having people that advocate for like, it doesn't have to be this bad, we could do this better. And having the willingness or ability for their company to put time in to push those things across the line and make it better for everybody. Like, like for example, one of my first core contributions was taking out the, was it the date and time?

I think it was the date and time question from the installer. Which is something that Drupal doesn't use anywhere. But the question was like, every time you install the test site, you have to answer that question, even though it doesn't get used almost anywhere, just because it was part of the form and nobody spent the time to be like, Hey, does this need to be, I don't even remember why that question got asked.

I think I just noticed an issue. It was like, Hey, this, I think I can actually do this. But even just highlighting those types of things I think is helpful. And then getting a, a group of designers and UX people that understand Drupal enough to know maybe some of the why and have some of the willingness to put in the effort to, to fix 'em.

I think, I think that's something that we, we desperately need as a community.

Before you move on, I, I wanted to get Kelly's thoughts on the impact of taking the, doing the group training and then getting certified.

Kelly: Yeah, so we had as part of like our study guide and, and stuff we also collaborated on the benefits that we saw coming from it. And I'm going to, I'll share a, a specific story from one of our designers who it, it made me smile one of the times he was talking about some work he was doing on a project, and he said, and I just wasn't understanding it.

So I went to my local Drupal instance and I put in everything that it was supposed to be, and it worked on my local Drupal instance and I couldn't figure it out. And I looked at him and I said, I want you to think back to pre-AP April when. Before we started doing this course to now, and the ease with which you just said.

So I went back and installed my local Drupal, or installed a local Drupal site, and I checked in on that and it's just, you know, it's those, it's those things that we say seemingly, seemingly so easy easily. Now that pre-AP April, we didn't have that knowledge. We didn't have the ability to test and see how it worked first and then start building the designs off of that.

I'm actually currently on a project that does not use Drupal, but for me, how it has been beneficial to me is in specifically like with the Drupal modules with that civic actions does. And then we've started a new, cohort or study group or learning, collaboration, whatever you'd like to call it.

Taking the Drupal theming course on Aquia Academy. So going through there, because we thought we had, I, I need to give a shout out to Chris Bauer, who was our resident front end engineer when we were going through the Drupal site builder course, who came to all of our weekly check-ins just to answer questions and provide more insight.

And we asked him at the end what would be more beneficial for designers as we kind of continued this journey through Drupal. And he was mentioning the theming course. So we just started the theming course on September 17th.

Stephen: But very cool. I I, by the way, I ha I love that civic actions is being so intentional.

I mean, obviously I'm not the first company to do this, but it's good to see a company that's being so intentional about. Leveling up level their employees and giving that back to the community, right? There's a lot of companies that do one or the other. Not everybody does, does both. And I think that's, I think that's helpful for Drupal as a whole

Kelly: and for to, to that point.

I shout out to our design director, Jenna who is very much our champion in doing all of this and supporting all of the designers in, in that leveling up and getting an, earning a new certification, even if it isn't in Drupal, but earning a new certification and making that one of our goals for this year, so.

Stephen: Awesome. Do you, before we move on, do you have backend developers in, in civic action as well? Yes. So I would assume, am I making an assumption or I would assume that after taking these courses, you guys have a more common language to speak to backend developers with. After getting more into site building.

Is that true?

Dave: I, I would say that one backend is a loaded term, right? Because you, there's, there's not just a front and backend to most modern web applications. There are two or three layers. So, but you know, absolutely in terms of people who are working on, right, the Drupal mm-hmm. Development and engineering.

Versus if we have a react front end and we have whatever DevOps infrastructure also happening, right? That Drupal layer, whether that's the front end of Drupal or Drupal, as the. Backend data source for a different front end presentation. Yeah. Or all of the things intermingled. That's right. That, that Drupal layer is definitely where, you know, we're able to, and I think, again, some of the things that we just had to get more comfortable with, like, installing a local Drupal instance, or in my case using the Pantheon online cloud hosting thing to have like a just standard kind of install I could play with you know, spinning up a local environment.

Right. That, that is something that developers do constantly, right. Which designers don't often have to do, but you know, as part of getting into Drupal, you kind of need to mm-hmm. Get past that discomfort and then it's like, oh yeah. A local instance. I, I, I actually know what that means 'cause I've done it or avoided doing it.

Intentionally,

Stephen: I love your transparency there, Dave.

Dave: Yeah, I, I mean, I, I appreciate, you know, you also when I was being generous and. Saying that there was irreducible complexity in Drupal saying that some of the complexity could be reduced. That is definitely true. But, you know, I think one thing that you know, we work with government agencies and these are places that have their own complexities.

And, you know, our goal is always to reduce that complexity so that, right, we're serving the American people better so they can get the services that, you know. They rely on every single day. That's really core to civic actions, mission and values. So we're always looking to understand the existing complexity and understand why certain things might be the way they are.

Even if at first blush they seem counterintuitive, counterproductive and really understand the existing ecosystem so that then we as designers can, you know, look for those opportunities and areas to reduce complexity and improve the experience. So, you know, I think that that is kind of the, the model that we come to when we go to clients and when we come to different ecosystems like Drupal.

Stephen: Awesome. And are there any. Particular pain points that getting the certification had solved, whether it's just knowledge or the ability, because I imagine before this you had to go to a developer or a site, another site builder on the team to like answer a question or do something or tell you what's possible.

I imagine. Were there any particular pain points that come to mind that no longer exist because now you just know how to do it yourself or you know, who add, you know where to look?

Kelly: I can't think of any specifically off the top of my head except to say that the second part of your question is my answer now, that if, if there were any, when, when I was doing the, the modules and working with in Drupal, I now know at least where to go to look for the answer and to, to that end. And Steven, you mentioned about speaking the same language.

I at least now have the language to go to the devs and say, this is what I need, this is how I think it should act. This is where I'm trying to do it. What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? Things like that. So it's having that, that shared knowledge and language now too.

Dave: How about you? I'm gonna Yeah.

Answer your question in a totally different way. So I think one of the, you know, the key aspects of what I've learned in, you know, my overall journey with Drupal is kind of the, the real hidden strength of site builder as a concept, right? That is not something that. Exists generally in web development and ecosystems, right?

It's a very Drupal specific layer of interaction where it's really about that you understand configuration and have like a vision. And Drupal has a really great admin interface where these are all like check boxes or you know, fields you can type in. Like you can do things that in other content management systems or frameworks would absolutely have to be done at the code layer.

But that admin, you know, UI in Drupal really empowers people who are able to have enough technical understanding to like navigate it to really, you know. Customize sites and make some of those changes themselves without needing to understand the underlying code, even if the configuration also exists as a code layer, right.

That, that UI is, is a really big benefit. And the, the fact that it exists and that that framework, like there's so much you can understand about why a given Drupal instance that you're in is working the way it is. Mm-hmm. Or what you can change within that layer. That I think, again, is, is one of Drupal's really great strengths that I, I, I don't think a lot of people really understand or tout as much as we could.

Stephen: I, I have a follow up question for that then. I guess, and, and maybe it, it sounds like you're still working in Drupal, Dave, so maybe this is more for Kelly, but you mentioned you're not designing in Drupal right now. Now that you have a better understanding of how Drupal works, are there pieces of Drupal that you miss in the other, like every system has its strengths, other pieces of Drupal that you're like, man, I just wish I had, I don't know, a form display so I could tweak this or X, Y, Z?

Kelly: Well, so even though I'm not on a project that's using Drupal, I am still, because, mostly because I'm not on a project that's using Drupal in my personal life, I am still trying to, I'm building a website for my husband for his business in Drupal so that I can keep up my practices and, and keep up my learning and my knowledge.

And I think. The ease of width of which layout builder has made that easier for me. And specifically, like Dave, you were talking about how, how that UI helps create it, it also like inherently teaches some UX principles in it, for instance, like site and information architecture. And what, what do you want to be a page?

What do you want to be a view? What do you want to be a menu link? What do you, where, how are you gonna lay out your site so that people can easily maneuver through it? I think that's the, a big benefit of it and something that if I were working within other content management systems or website creation would be missing for me.

Stephen: Fair

enough. I'm, I'm curious to know what the gap was between your knowledge of Drupal. Before, before going down this site building course and, and certification, what was the gap, not just necessarily for yourselves, but also for the team, the seven people at large? Like how big was that gap and what are the main things that, that, that filled in for you through taking that course?

Kelly: Yeah. In, in my previous position we built our help website in Drupal. And so as the, as a content designer, one of our functions was to create help documentation. So all of that was built and edited within the Drupal interface as content editors. We never had access to any of the configuration portions of it.

So I was what, what I thought was confident and comfortable building within Drupal turns out was not what it was. But now having taken the course, I, I see the difference in what's possible to do as a content editor versus who gives those permissions to the content editors and, and sets those up. So I would say I was probably, if we're one very limited knowledge to five Dave Pickett knowledge, I was probably a two, maybe two and a half when I came in.

We did have designers who I feel would, would rate themselves at maybe half or one when they entered. And then, you know, we had Dave, our rockstar, who had already been doing it, but just hadn't gotten. But I don't wanna talk for you, Dave, so go ahead.

Dave: No, please. I, I'll, I'll take Dave Pickett as the high end of the scale.

No additional comment needed

Stephen: on a scale from Zero to Dave. You know, we,

Dave: I actually had to create a custom emoji which is Dave, the Drupal Fairy, and it's me as like a little fairy with the Drupal logo as the wings. Because that was how people felt whenever, you know, an issue would come up and I'd be like, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they'd be like, wait, you just fixed that? Like, how, what? I'm like, yeah. I mean, that's just configuration one line. It's a one word PR change from, from true to false in one place. And just knowing how to do that right, like, it's, it's not actually that hard and it's really not worth engineering time.

You know. When they could be doing something with actual like code and architecture, right? Like versus we're changing something from true to false because we want to show or not show something in the admin interface. Like that is like, being able to actually implement my design, right? Like in yeah, these very small things.

Like, it's great, you know, then it, it reduces the need for back and forth. And, you know, I'll still have a engineer review my prs, et cetera. Yeah. But yeah, just that so that, that, that again is like the level at which I was operating before, before that course. But it was really great to go through it with people.

You know, we had one who had had. Done a lot of designing and Drupal and again, had kind of had the school of hard knocks and she was like, I wish I had taken this, like when I started at Civic Actions or started on any project with Drupal, like it's a great introductory course to the basics of Drupal, right?

If you go through that aqueous site building course, it gets you to add content to the site, right? Again, what Kelly talked about is like level one and it gets you to configure a content type or two, right? Kind of that level two stuff. Like, it gets you a lot of really basic concepts and even if you wouldn't remember like, oh, that's how I did that.

Like, just the fact that, you know, it's possible within Drupal and that's like the levels that you can kind of ascend is really, I think, valuable for setting the context of the whole ecosystem.

Stephen: I'm, I'm curious and maybe you guys don't have the answer for this, but when you were choosing a course to take.

Do you know what drove you to the Aquia course or were there other courses available that you were considering? You may not know the answer to that.

Kelly: Well for me it was I had taken the same pro dev well exper tried to take the same pro dev sprint earlier with the engineers that Dave had taken, and that was the course that they had chosen to go through.

So that was kind of just my knowledge base of what was out there and, and what to go with first. So. Okay. No specific reason other than that's what I already thought I knew. Okay.

Stephen: So I, I actually wanna flip this around 'cause it, it sounds like this certification was pretty beneficial for you guys for, for a couple of reasons.

But one of the recurring themes is that it's helped with communication, right? Knowing what piece to talk about or who to ask for a particular thing. Has has helped kind of these, these handoff situations. I'm curious about, I'm a developer. I'm curious if you have any thoughts or ideas on resources or courses that a developer could take to kind of do the same thing for a designer.

Like, is there a design course I could take to be like, Hey, here's the, you know, A to Z high level overview of what design is so that I'm not asking, you know, quote unquote questions that I should just have a foundation in and, and know the language to use when talking to designers. 'cause it, it's a two way communication is a two way street, right?

So if developers can improve to, do you, do you have any, I don't think there's an awe certification for design, but

Nick, I thought developers knew everything.

Dave: Yeah, well I would say, you know, I really always like. I, I, I've personally, the way I learn is, you know, in context first, rather like from high level concepts. So for me, right, like I learned Drupal because I had to, 'cause it was part, and I had a really great again developer I was working with Steve Wort, also Christian Burke Jay Darnell, lots of wonderful Drupal developers I got to work with on a regular basis who were very, you know, willing to help me understand.

And, you know, I think to the extent that communication is a two-way street, right? I would help them understand, you know. What I was thinking about from the design perspective. So start by talking to your local designer on your project and understanding their specific pain points. And you know, I think use that as a jumping off point for particularly like if there's a design tool or framework that they're using, why are they using that?

What are the benefits? How can you interact with that or understand that? And then build from there.

Kelly: And I, I would echo that and take it even maybe one step farther in that work with your local designer to kind of build your own Drupal design system so that when as new designers come in, or as new engineers come in, they can pull from that design system that you've already worked on together and with that same both points of view and same language and, and help create it that way.

Also, there's, there's so many. Just like with site builder certifications, there's so many different courses that you could take. There's so many different ways and paths that you could take and you know, even individual specialties of product or visual design. Graphic design. There's, there's so many out there that what Dave said is probably the easiest way is just find, find a designer buddy and, and buddy up.

Stephen: Sounds, sounds good. We we're coming up towards the end of the show, so I'm gonna try to speed up a little bit, but I, I'm curious about the, we've talked a lot about how you prepared, right? You took, you kind of did study groups, you took that ACO course, but let's talk a little bit closer to the actual test and preparing.

Were there, how did you kind of prepare for the day of test? Did you do some last minute cramming? Did you review something like that? How did you prepare to take the, the actual test? What was that like?

Kelly: Well, first we made Dave take it first so he could, so he could tell us what it was like. But for, for me and Dave, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut in front of you, but for me, based off his recommendations, I went back through our study guide a lot the questions that we had raised in Slack.

I also rewatched the, the entire course in the videos. I didn't do it, but I just rewatched all the videos. And then very admittedly, I memorized the 20 questions study guide question that's on, that's on the Acquia site builder site. Okay. Because I thought that would help at least again, help me speak the same language even if they weren't the same questions.

Stephen: Yeah.

Kelly: On there.

Stephen: How about you, Dave?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing that I didn't really fully understand until like I was getting ready to take the test is how intense the remote proctoring is. Right? You need to clear your desk and then be ready to show the whole room that you're sitting in.

So I had to clean with part of my preparation right. So, you know, I think, yeah, I, I reviewed the materials, but a lot of it was just even this, you know, I haven't taken a test like in my life in a long time. And, you know, technology has changed and, you know, the, I thi I think I did my SATs online in 2002 or on a computer.

Right. And that was, you know, one thing, this is a totally different experience, so even part of it was just understanding the technology setup of the online proctoring thing. And like, I then left a ton of notes about like, okay, you're gonna need to use this special browser and make sure you log into both of these different websites ahead of time.

Otherwise you're gonna have to be pulling up your phone, which you're not supposed to even have in the room with you to get your password and type it in again. Right. Like, just little things like that that yeah. That, that was more, I think where a lot of my oh, I wish I had prepared for these kind of aspects came in as opposed to the material.

Stephen: Dare I ask, did you pass the test?

Dave: I did, we did. Okay.

Stephen: So as we wrap up today, do you have any final advice for designers or organizations thinking about taking this approach that you've taken? It's not

with Dave.

Dave: Find a buddy, right? I think it's easier to do this when you have somebody who's going through it with you so that you can bounce questions off of each other and you know, somebody who's kind of coming at it from the same perspective you are can be helpful. You know, so you feel like you're, you're in it with somebody else and just say, Hey, I'm, I wanna do this.

Would you be willing to do it with me? Easier to, to, to do it together than try and doing it by your lonesome.

Kelly: Yeah. I I would also add break it down. Take it in small chunks. Drupal can be very, very overwhelming, particularly if you have little experience in it. So, you know, instead of looking at the course and, and all of the modules kind of follow our model, I guess, of, you know, maybe a module.

Sometimes we even did just half a module a week. Take it, break it down into small chunks, make it seem more manageable. It's the agile and scrum sprint idea of, you know, make it smaller chunks, easily more deliverable on shorter timeframes, and you put enough small pieces together and you got a whole beach full of rocks, so.

Stephen: Awesome. Well, Dave and Kelly, thank you for joining us. We appreciate your patience with a couple of technical difficulties today.

Kelly: Well, thank you very much for having us.

Stephen: Yeah, it was a pleasure.

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All right, Dave, if our listeners wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Dave: I guess LinkedIn. I don't know. I'm not really on social media or you know, [email protected], or I guess I'm on the Drupal Slack too. Yeah, perfect.

Stephen: And Kelly, I put it in the show

Dave: notes.

You got it. Yeah.

Kelly: Yeah, it's [email protected]. K Smith on Drupal do org, and Kelly s on the Drupal Slack.

Stephen: Perfect. And Stephen, how about you Stephen Cross with a pH and you can find me pretty much everywhere at Nicxvan N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking.

See you guys next week.