Notices enable you to show content to visitors depending on various criteria and conditions related to the visitor and page they are viewing. The system is extremely flexible, allowing notices to be displayed to an individual member on a single template, or to all visitors on all pages, as well as many other combinations between the two.
Managing Notices
- Log in to the Admin Control Panel.
- Click on Notices from the list on the left hand side.
From here you can see a list of all Notices created. Clicking the title will allow you to view, edit, and delete them. Notices can be disabled and re-enabled via the checkbox.
Re-enabling a disabled notice will not make it appear again to members who have previously dismissed that notice.
Creating A Notice
To create a new Notice, click on the + Create New Notice button. You will be presented with a number of tabs which will now be explained.
Notice Options
The Title is only displayed when there is more than one scrolling notice present on the same page. Individual notices and stacked notices do not display the title.
The Message field supports plain text, images and any other valid HTML. It is also possible to use a {name} token which will be replaced by the logged in member's user name, allowing you to personalize the message.
To have complete control over the appearance, you must uncheck Add default notice text styling. Any additional styling in the Notices section of Style Properties must also be taken into account when using this option.
Guests can not dismiss notices.
It is possible to allow members to dismiss a notice or make it permanent.
Members can however restore all dismissed notices via their account preferences page.
The Display Order will determine the order of the notice in relation to other notices; notices with lower values will display before, or above, those with higher values.
User Criteria
Various user-related criteria can be defined, including:
- User status.
- User groups.
- Message, like, and trophy point count.
- Like to message ratio.
- Number of days registered.
- User profile settings.
- Specific user criteria such as user name and email address.
Date Criteria
In addition to displaying a notice based on a member's birthday, it is also possible to display a notice before, during, or after a specific time period.
For any visitors not logged in, the guest time zone specified in Basic Board Information will apply.
The time can be set to a single time zone which will affect all visitors at exactly the same time, no matter which time zone they have set in their account preferences. Or, it can be based on the time zone they have set in their account profiles, which will mean members will see the notice at different times to each other.
Page Criteria
If you wish notices to show in categories, Create Pages for Categories must be checked in the Node & Forum List section of the Options.
The simplest way to target a notice at a particular page is to use the Nodes option. Multiple nodes can be selected, be they categories, forums, or pages.
Setting a notice to display in a parent node will also apply to all child nodes and threads, unless further criteria are defined, as explained below.
The Page Information criteria are far more powerful and flexible, but do require some knowledge of the template system and underlying code.
The Selected Navigation Tab refers to the ID of the tab, which is not necessarily the name of the tab. If the Forums tab has been renamed, by editing the phrase for example, the ID entered in the field would still be forums. Any tabs created by add-ons can also be referenced here.
It is not possible to selectively show or hide notices in child nodes of the same type.
The Content Template field allows for a specific template to be targeted. When used in conjunction with the Nodes option, it allows you to, for example, set a notice to display in a forum but not in the thread view. This can be achieved by selecting the forum from the node list and entering forum_view in the Content Template field, thereby ensuring only forum node pages meet the criteria.
To identify the name of a template, using your browser, view the page source and look for a line of code near the top of the page similar to this: <div id="content" class="forum_list">
The class denotes the template name, forum_list in this example.
The Controller, Action, and View Class fields require some development knowledge of the code and are outside the scope of this document.
Custom User Field Criteria
If you have defined any Custom User Fields then this tab allows you to define specific criteria related to them. Any members with matching content in their account settings will see the notice.
Criteria
If multiple criteria are defined, a visitor must match all of them for the notice to display. If no criteria are defined, the notice will display to all visitors on all pages.
If conflicting criteria are defined, for example selecting guest status and a user group, then the notice will not show.
Styling Notices
General styling of the notice container, individual notice panels, and the navigation tabs, which are visible when there is more than one scrolling notice on a page, is achieved via the Notices section of Style Properties. It is also possible to change the speed and direction of scrolling notices, or alternatively, display multiple notices stacked on top of each other.To have complete control over the appearance, Add default notice text styling must be unchecked for each notice and any Style Properties settings must also be removed.
Each notice can be individually styled using inline styling and by using EXTRA.css and utilising the notice ID. The notice ID can be obtained from the browser address bar when editing a notice. It takes the form of admin.php?notices/test-notice.1/edit, where the value after the notice title is the ID, in this case 1, which would make the CSS class for that particular notice .notice_1.
Using Notices
The following video demonstrates the Notices system in action: