Add announcement section

Will revisit this in 2.x.

Michelle

Just curious on this one, but understand if you are busy with other things.

Would the announcement post/data be made visible on a designated forum (or container?), or there would be one (global?) announcement?

We could store it in system table perhaps (the announcement content).

But perhaps, and better solution would be a content type named 'Forum Announcement' that has a field to tie it to a particular forum/container. Then Advanced forum could add look for these 'published' nodes for a given forum/container.

"Forum Announcement" could perhaps be made into a dependent module.

Let me know your thoughts. I am moderately comforatble with creating modules.

I really haven't given it any thought beyond seeing stand alone software has this. I won't be working on 2.x for probably a month or so.

Michelle

I understand Michelle.

Speaking of standalone software, I checked my vBulletin installation to see how they have implemented it. Took some screenshots and some notes so that we have it for later reference.

• Announcement Manager provides a [New] button to for each forum/container. (forum-announcement-1.png)
• Forum Announcement content type seems to have a title and body section - analogous to the node content type. (forum-announcement-2.png)
• Forum Announcement content type creation allows for different formats that we can delegate to Drupal's Input Format features. (forum-announcement-2.png)
• Forum Announcement content type requires a start date and end date, within which period, it would be shown on top of topic list for a given forum. (forum-announcement-2.png)
• Forum Announcement should be visible on the selected forum/container and all the child forums/containers. (forum-announcement-2.png, forum-announcement-3.png)

PS: Sorry for choosing ugly red-yellow theme for screenshot annotations. :P

Thanks for looking into this further. This will come in handy when I work on it. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm blowing you off... I just have my plate full right now and have to force myself to not get sucked into 2.x until 1.0 is out. :)

Michelle

No problem at all Michelle! We all need to set our priorities to get things done.

And you can surely ignore any further updates I make here as an when I get time to chip in. You can visit it when you put this issue back on your plate. :)

Just speaking off the cuff, one possibility might be to use the Flag module (if available) to create a custom "Announcement" flag for forum node types. You could then use normal forum node types for announcements, and this should be themable as well. The downside is dependency on yet another contrib module for functionality.

Not a bad idea. It wouldn't be a true dependency as in you can't enable the module without it so I don't mind.

Thanks,

Michelle

Just FYI, there is a module Announcements based off some open IBM code. That module is quite solid. It provides dates for the node to be visible, and some config options around blocks, front page etc.

Pushing this off to 3.x

Michelle