The Announcements List widget is a great way to post announcements that are available to all the members of your community. The widget has more than two dozen parameters that enable you to customize a variety of posting and display options. You can even enable RSS that members can subscribe to in order to receive community announcements via RSS.

• As a Community Admin, you can post announcements to the members of your community.
  Unless Announcements are disabled on your site, the announcements widget is included on each community's Home page (an example is shown below). By default, only the members of a community can view that community's announcements.
• As a Super Admin, you can post announcements to either your entire user base or just the members of one community.
  Generally, the announcements widget is included on a site's main landing page and each community's Home page (an example on a community Home page is shown below).

NOTE: Email notifications are not sent for announcements, but users can include them in their Consolidated digests and subscribe via RSS.

Initial configuration

Community landing pages and Microsites commonly display community-specific announcements by default. Community Microsites have a special parameter to limit their announcements to the community they serve: FilterByMicrosite="True". As long as this parameter is configured for a community Microsite, only that community's announcements will be displayed. You should also add this parameter to the model site on which new community Microsites are based, allowing new community websites to display community-specific announcements by default.

With the correct configuration, community-specific announcements display redundantly across websites: The same announcement made on the community landing page will display on the community Microsite and vice-versa.

Unless disabled, your Higher Logic site has Announcements configured for you. By default, your main website will include the Announcements List widget on its landing page and a hidden page listing all announcements. You and your users can access this hidden page by clicking the View More link below the widget (if there are enough announcements for the button to appear).

By default, the landing page and hidden page only display public announcements (this is because the Announcement Type and Filter by Announcement Type parameters are set to "MainHome," so only announcements belonging to this Type are shown). However, you can easily update these two widgets to show all announcements across all communities.

Announcements security

Announcements without a community attribution are public and are limited only by CMS access settings for the page or Content Item on which the announcements display.

• View permissions for a community's announcements are established by selecting an option from the Who Can View? setting, which is configured on the community's Edit Community Settings page.

RSS

RSS functionality is built into the widget. This functionality provides two benefits:

• Users can add announcement feeds they're interested in to their RSS reader, so that they can easily stay informed about all organizational and community announcements.
• You can use this feature to display your organizational and community announcements on external (non-Higher Logic) websites.

Enable RSS for an announcement

RSS must be enabled per announcements widget.

• When you add or edit the Announcements List widget, scroll to the bottom of the edit dialog and set the Show RSS Icon? parameter to Yes.

When the RSS icon is enabled, it displays below an announcement's title. This icon provides a URL for that announcement feed, which can be added to aggregators like Google Reader.

You can also use this URL to display Announcements on external websites (see the How to display announcements on external websites below). This might require reformatting through tools like Pipes or Google Feedburner. Explore the use of these tools for optimal formatting.

How to display announcements on external websites

You can use the URL accessed through an announcement's RSS icon as the basis to display announcements on external (non-Higher Logic) websites. Additionally, you can create RSS URLs using common variables and the Content Key for Announcements (the RSS key for Announcements is 767a4236-163e-4c698a93baa7d7762196).

TIP: The two examples that follow are free of line breaks; they can be copied and pasted as is.

To establish an all-announcements feed URL, use the link below as a model. Replace YOURSITEURL to that of your organization.

http://YOURSITEURL/higherlogic/rss/rssfeedpage.aspx?rsscontentkey=767a4236-163e-4c698a93baa7d7762196&showpublicrss=true&showall=true

This can be extended through variables (parts of the URL after the "?" or "and" symbols) as shown below. Again, replace YOURSITEURL to that of your organization and change ANNOUNCEMENTTYPE to the variable from the parameter established for a unique Announcement Type.

http://YOURSITEURL/higherlogic/rss/rssfeedpage.aspx?rsscontentkey=767a4236-163e-4c698a93baa7d7762196&showpublicrss=true&IsNoType=False&ShowAll=False&Type=ANNOUNCEMENTTYPE

RSS Content Keys

Use the Content Keys below to generate product-specific RSS URLs. As the first variable in the URL, they generally follow "aspx" in the URL and are preceded by ?RSSContentKey=.

NOTE: All of these must be accompanied by the variable, ShowPublicRSS=true.

Integration write-backs

If your site is integrated with a third-party database, some announcement activities in your Community can be written to that database during the standard activity-sync process.

• Navigate to Settings > External Content > Activity Sync in the Admin interface in order to manage writeback activities on the Subscriptions tab.

To learn about the activity-sync process, see Member Activity Sync.