[CDB] [Official Ext] Board Announcements

[EXreaction]

The Extensions Development Team is working on this Board Announcements Extension.

This extension will allow administrators to easily give simple announcements for their board. These announcements will be displayed on all pages for every user. Users can close announcements so that they individually do not see them any longer.

Current Status:
Release Candidate 1

Requirements:
phpBB 3.1.0-RC2 or newer
PHP 5.3.3 or newer

We have come up with our target list of features for the extension:

• Announcement text customisable in ACP
• Single announcement/notice
• Customisable colour for background of announcement container
• Dismiss notice
• Ability for admin to reset all dismissals of notice (for example on changing it)
• BBcode Support

Github Repository: https://github.com/phpbb-extensions/boardannouncements

Installation:

1. Unzip the downloaded release, and change the name of the folder to boardannouncements.
2. In the ext directory of your phpBB board, create a new directory named phpbb (if it does not already exist).
3. Copy the boardannouncements folder to phpBB/ext/phpbb/ (if done correctly, you'll have the main extension class at (your forum root)/ext/phpbb/boardannouncements/ext.php).
4. Navigate in the ACP to Customise -> Manage extensions.
5. Look for Board Announcements under the Disabled Extensions list, and click its Enable link.
6. Set up and configure Board Announcements by navigating in the ACP to Extensions -> Board Announcements.

Important: Only official release versions validated by the phpBB Extensions Team should be installed on a live forum. Pre-release (beta, RC) versions downloaded from the GitHub repository are only to be used for testing on offline/development forums and are not officially supported.

All are welcome to contribute to the extension by forking our repository and submitting a Pull Request through Github.

[Mess]

Awesome, I can think of a lot of great uses for this.

[watisnf.nl]

Sounds promising, but I would like to see some screen shots when the time is there Is it like the 3.0 announcement center or totally different?

[M.Gaetan89]

Sounds great!

Is it possible to make the announcement translatable?

[MichaelC]

Is it possible to make the announcement translatable?

No. It will be one set text for all users. We are aiming to keep this extension simple so it can be used to demonstrate about basic extension creation and structure.

[EXreaction]

Sounds promising, but I would like to see some screen shots when the time is there Is it like the 3.0 announcement center or totally different?

We do not yet have a design plan and I'm not familiar with that mod.

[Darkness_demoN]

I suggest a few options.
1. Annonce to be shown only in one or a few group of people.
- If you have groups 33, 77 and group 66 to choose message to be shown only on group 33 or 33 and 66.
2. Popup when you login.
- When user login into site to see Popup window with that annonce.
3. Ability to add all bbcodes that are instaled in the forum, include [img] and if is instaled [td] too

Question:
Where and how we will see that announce ? It will be popup when you login and will stay on top of the forum where are Forum rules ?

I will make image with my vision after i comeback at home from work.

Over all i thik the idea of this extension is great.

[MattF]

It will not be a popup.

It will be a simple single alert style message at the top of the page, most likely under the header navbar. It will look a lot like the red/pink "Forum Rules" banner you see in forums, except we will allow for the color of it to be configurable.

It's intention is for announcements - that is, you are an admin and you need to notify your forum's members about something, like scheduled downtime, or new bbcodes were added, or a new forum was created for certain topics to be discussed there now, or membership meetups scheduled, etc.

It's intention is not for advertising, not for some kind of welcome message, etc. It's simply for creating an important "news" announcement you need to alert to the attention of your board's visitors.

Visitors will be able to close it once they've read it so they will not be bothered by it again.

It will hopefully be a clean, simple and direct to the point extension with no unnecessary bells or whistles.

[MattF]

It might look something like this possible mock-up:

alternate.jpg

[Darkness_demoN]

Mhm, Ok. Looks nice
Than i will make new topik in idea forums I will hope to see it and give apinion

[M.Gaetan89]

Is it possible to make the announcement translatable?

No. It will be one set text for all users. We are aiming to keep this extension simple so it can be used to demonstrate about basic extension creation and structure.

Ok, I understand.

What about setting a start/end date/time for the announcement? So it will automatically show up at the given date, and hide at the given date.

[MattF]

Here is just a fun example of an announcement being used in a totally inappropriate way, but also an awesome way!

Using the custom bg color option in connection with the Advanced BBCodes Box extension to embed some video and customize the fonts!

demo.jpg

[Louis7777]

What about setting a start/end date/time for the announcement? So it will automatically show up at the given date, and hide at the given date.

Would be nice

I also have a suggestion, in case you'd like to add more stuff to this extension in the future.

How about a countdown for events? I've used this nice mod before that works with jQuery: PhpBB Countdown MOD

"The PhpBB Countdown MOD displays a countdown in your forum header, just below the navbar.
It can be configured in ACP. You can enable/disable the countdown and set it to count down or count up.
You can also set the date and a text displayed before the countdown and a text that will replace the countdown when finished."

The idea is that you can make an announcement for an event and count up or down to the event.

[aleha]

In core, the @package tag has been removed. Should we also remove it from extension?
I am asking in this topic, because this ext will serve as an example as mentioned.

[MattF]

Extensions can really do whatever they want, so long as the doc blocks are valid.

Having said that, we have actually been using @package incorrectly:
"The @package tag can be used as a counterpart or supplement to Namespaces."
http://www.phpdoc.org/docs/latest/refer ... ckage.html

I would say the following format should be the way to go moving forward:

Code: Select all

/**
*
* Board Announcements extension for the phpBB Forum Software package.
*
* @copyright (c) 2014 phpBB Limited <https://www.phpbb.com>
* @license GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0)
*
*/