Versions Compared

Version Old Version 7 New Version Current
Changes made by

Andrew Petro

Andrew Petro

Saved on

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.
Comment: Corrected links that should have been relative instead of absolute.

...

A widely used announcements channel for uPortal allowing fine-grained authorization to determine who can make announcements and who can see them. The included Read Me file has complete instructions for installation, and a thorough description of the available functionality.

USC

...

Tip

On behalf of the University of Southern California, Unicon has made several enhancements to Columbia University's Announcements channel. All modifications have been checked into the announcements module under the 'USC' branch. These enhancements include:

  • pluggable html WYSIWYG editor (htmlArea by default)
  • Role-based topic management (simpler permission management)
  • Announcement and topic paging and page navigation
  • Sorting and paging preferences management
  • new end user and administrator views and features
  • new elements added to the announcement messages(i.e., Announcement title and abstract)
  • more options in the area of topic management.

Further information on all our changes can be viewed in the USC_Announcements.pdf document within the docs directory. We encourage everyone to take a look and test our new enhancements and provide any feedback on what more you would like to see with the channel in the future and what enhancements you may already have that you are willing to donate. If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to e-mail me at dgrimwood@unicon.net.

Thank you.

Dave Grimwood

Downloading this code from CVS

To get the USC code issue the following cvs commands via the CVS command line tool:

...

Announcements Branch

USC has developed a branch of the Announcements channel with particular changes.

SJDC further enhancements on the USC Announcements branch

SJDC, working with Unicon, Inc., has developed further enhancements on the USC branch of the announcements channel with particular changes.

Contributed Enhancements

Announcements available via RSS

Keith Zantow of Virginia Tech has contributed enhancements to make Announcements available as RSS:

Here are the only needed modifications to generate RSS feeds from the CU Announcements channel. Simply overwrite the CAnnouncements.jsp and copy TopicToRSS.xsl to the same directory. Or, untar the file in the directory with your CAnnouncements.jsp. This should be the uPortal context root directory (e.g. webapps/uPortal under tomcat).
You may generate RSS from any remotely available Topic source by simply adding the parameter type=rss to the URL. For example, to get topic 16 as RSS, you would use the URL: http://my.server/my-uportal-context/CAnnouncements.jsp?topicID=16&type=rss without the type=rss, the jsp page behaves as it did before.

...

  • See the Attachments section for the required files

Also note: the "homeURL" parameter in the XSL file you should change to a URL you want people directed to when no URL is specified for the announcement message.