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 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.

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

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.

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