Adding a Topic
Every announcement must have a topic, so the first step to getting an announcement published is creating a new topic. You'll notice that there is already a topic named "EMERGENCY." This is a reserved topic for posting emergency announcements only. (That will be covered later.)
First click on "Add a new Topic" and fill out the form completely.
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The different subscription methods describe how you want the audience of this topic to receive the announcements.
Subscription Method | Definition |
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Pushed, required | This method forces all audience members to be subscribed to this topic at all times. Audience members may not unsubscribe. |
Pushed, optional | This method puts this topic into all audience members' subscriptions, but allows them to unsubscribe if they wish. |
Pulled, optional | This method makes this topic available to any audience member, but it is up to the user to manually subscribe the topic in order to view it. |
Additionally, you may choose to offer this topic as publicly-viewable RSS. Only audience members are provided with the RSS link (found on the Edit Subscriptions screen), but anybody who knows the link may gain access to the announcements.
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Setting up Topic Permissions
Now that you've added a new topic, you must, at a bare minimum, define the audience of the topic. From the home screen of the Announcements Admin portlet, select the cog icon ("Manage") from the icons next to your new topic.
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This brings up the topic management screen. The topic management screen is divided into two sections: Announcements on top and Permissions below. In the Permissions section, locate the column labeled "Audience Members" and click the "Edit" link.
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You may select any combination of groups or individual users. Enter users by their unique portal user IDs. When you are finished, click "Update." In this example, we've selected "Everyone" as the group, which is mapped to the uPortal root group in the
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portlet.xml
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file.
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Adding an Announcement
Before you add an announcement, be sure that you have created a topic and assigned some audience members to it.
Click on "Add Announcement" to bring up the new announcement screen. Here you must fill in all fields except Link (URL), which is optional. When announcements are displayed, the abstract is not shown when users view the full announcement. So if you have important information in the abstract, be sure to repeat it in the message body. You must also set a date to begin displaying the announcement and a date to stop displaying it. Dates can be typed in the MM/DD/YYYY format or selected from the date-picker by clicking the calendar icon.
<img src="%ATTACHURLPATH%/add-ann.png" alt="add-ann.png" width='851' height='602' />
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Save the announcement to place it into the queue for the topic.
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Publishing an Announcement
Announcements must be published by a user with Editor privileges or higher. When announcements are edited, they must be published again.
Announcements in the queue show a status of "Pending" with a red background in the topic management screen. Click the green checkmark icon ("Publish") in order to publish the announcement. If the announcement is scheduled to display today, the status changes to "Showing" with a green background. However, if the announcement is post-dated, it will show a status of "Scheduled" also with a green background. When an announcement has expired (and before it is automatically deleted) it will show a status of "Expired" with a red background.
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Unpublishing an Announcement
Similar to publishing an announcement, to unpublish an announcement, click the red stop sign icon ("Take Down") in order to unpublish the announcement. The announcement is immediately changed to a status of "Pending" and is no longer displayed to users.
<img src="%ATTACHURLPATH%/unpublish.png" alt="unpublish.png" width='679' height='280' />
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An announcement in the pending state will still be automatically deleted once its end date has passed. |
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Deleting an Announcement
Announcements that expired the previous day are automatically deleted at 3 a.m. each morning. This includes announcements with a "Pending" status. You may also delete an announcement manually by clicking the trash can icon ("Delete") in the topic management screen.
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Deleting a Topic
If you are a Portal Administrator as defined by the "Portal_Administrators" group in
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portlet.xml
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, you may delete an entire topic. Doing so will delete all announcements within the topic and the action is not reversible. To delete the entire topic, click the trash can icon ("Delete") in the "Admin Home" screen.
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Delegating the Workload
You should try to delegate your workload by allow other users to become Topic Admins, Contributors or Editors of a certain topic. You assign them in the same way that you assign Audience Members (see
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). Additionally, a diminished UI is provided for each type of role. For example, contributors and editors cannot see the "Permissions" section of the Topic management screen. See the chart below for the differences between roles.
| | Create Topic | Edit Topic | Delete Topic | Edit Topic Permissions | Add Ann. | Edit Ann. | Delete Ann. | Publish Ann. | Unpublish Ann. |
Portal Admin | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Topic Admin | | Yes | | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Editor | | | | | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Contributor | | | | | Yes | Yes (if author) | Yes (if author) | | |
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As the table shows, roles are inherited. That is, no user needs to be a member of anymore than one group. |
Emergency Announcements
The Portal Admin can manage a special topic named "EMERGENCY." This topic cannot be edit nor can it be deleted. There can only be one emergency topic. It is created automatically when the Announcements Portlet is loaded for the first time. Whenever an announcement is added to the Emergency topic and published, a special announcement appears for all users specified as audience members. Although the Portal Admin can choose to assign different audience members to the Emergency Topic, it is advised to leave it as is. You can add contributors, editors, and topic admins to the Emergency topic just like any other topic.
To add an emergency announcement, follow the same procedure as for any other topic. Click the cog icon ("Manage") from the Admin home screen.
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A live emergency announcement is depicted below.
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