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Description

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 branch

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:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@www.uportal.org:/home/cvs/jasig login
(Press Enter)
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@www.uportal.org:/home/cvs/jasig co -r USC portal_channels/announcements

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.

Notes: the topic must be available remotely (using the checkbox in the Topic settings screen). This generates only RSS 2.0, as it includes dates with the items. The RSS items are sorted based on the pub date, and if available, the date they should begin to be displayed, which is also what is used to add the pubDate field to the RSS. It is also necessary to find the topic ID, which is not readily available - it can be found relatively easily by looking in the database under UPC_CU_ANN_TOPIC.

  • See the Attachments section for the required files
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