WordPress Plugin – Scheduled Announcement Widget
Description
The Scheduled Announcements Widget lets you add a scrolling list of site announcements, independent of normal posts and pages, to any widgetized area of your site, or to your theme files. Perfect for publicizing an event, alert, or notice that doesn’t require a full-page write-up. Announcements can be scheduled to run indefinitely or during a specific date range, and admins can chose between horizontal or vertical scrolling.
Download
WordPress Repo: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scheduled-announcements-widget
Direct Downloads:
Version 0.2 – 9/5/2104
Version 0.1.8.1 – 4/22/2014
Version 0.1.8 – 12/5/2013 *bug fix
Version 0.1.7 – 12/4/2013
Version 0.1.6 – 5/16/2013
Version 0.1.5 – 12/13/2012
Version 0.1.4 – 11/23/2012
Version 0.1.3 – 11/6/2012 *bug fix
Version 0.1.2 – 6/27/2012
Version 0.1.1 – 3/7/2012
Version 0.1 – 2/1/2012
Screenshots
Contributors: kionae
Tags: announcements, alerts, scheduled announcements
Donate link: http://nlb-creations.com/donate/
Requires at least: 3.2.1
Tested up to: 4.0
Stable tag: trunk
Installation
- Unzip and upload plugin to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Add announcements using the Announcements tab in the WordPress Dashboard.
- Configure your widget under Announcements > Settings
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I re-order my announcements?
Yes, as of version 0.1.1. Each Announcement now includes a numerical Order field. You can set whether you want the widget to display Announcements in ascending or descending order based on this field in the plugin’s Settings panel.
Can I put the ticker in a post or page?
Yes, using the shortcode [announcements]
The shortcode function can use the default configuration options set in Announcements > Settings, or it can be customized manually using any of the following variables.
title – Will display a header title above the ticker
show_titles – Will show or hide the title field of the announcements. Set to 1 for show, 0 for hide.
order – Set whether announcements display in ascending or descending order. Valid options are ‘ASC’ or ‘DESC’.
scroll – The scroll style of the ticker. Valid options are ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’.
speed – The speed in milliseconds at which the ticker will scroll
transition – The length in milliseconds at which the scroll animation will take to complete
width – The width in pixels of the ticker
height – The height in pixels of the ticker
link – The hexidecimal color code to use for links in the announcements (eg. 0000FF for blue)
text – The hexidecimal color code to use for text in the announcements (eg. 000000 for black)
saw_id – User-specified CSS ID for the ticker
tax – The taxonomy/category ID (you may use the ID or the slug) to filter by
For example:
[announcements title="Announcements" order="ASC" show_titles="1" scroll="horizontal" speed="4000" transition="800" width="600" height="50" link="0000FF" text="000000" saw_id="news" tax="my-news"]
Can I display announcements by category?
Yes. Assign a category to your announcement, and then select that category from the dropdown menu in the widget settings. If you are using the shortcode rather
than the widget, set the “tax” attribute to either the ID or slug of the category you wish to display. Make sure you are using slugs/IDs for the Announcement Categories
(displayed under the Announcements tab in the Dashboard) and not the default WordPress Categories.
[announcements tax="news"]
or
[announcements tax="7"]
I want to put more than one ticker on a page, but it breaks when I try.
You need to give each ticker its own unique id. In the shortcode this is done with the saw_id attribute (see shortcode example two questions back). In the widget, just fill in the
text box label Ticker ID.
You should also avoid the use of hyphens in your ID names, because it will royally mess up the javascript. In most cases, if you forget, the plugin will automatically replace them
with underscores.
Changelog
0.2
- Fixed an issue with the shortcode not having default configuration settings if the user hasn’t visited the config page.
- Verified WordPress 4.0 compatibility
0.1.8.1
- Added some text to clarify the purpose of some of the widget fields.
- Updated the icon
0.1.8
- Fixed a badly written query for announcements filtered by category (thanks to Jurrien Dokter for pointing it out and offering a fix!)
0.1.7
- Fixed some WordPress 3.7.1 compatibility issues
- Altered shortcode to accept either category ID or category slug.
- Added default CSS id to the shortcode to prevent conflicts with the sidebar widget.
- Added code to replace hypens with underscores in user-defined ID names so javascript doesn’t freak out.
0.1.6
- Removed divider between anouncement title and text, and replaced it with a CSS span styles can be applied to if desired
0.1.5
- Fixed issue with unpublished announcements showing up in the scroller.
- Clarified how the date scheduling feature works.
0.1.4
- Added the ability to change the transition speed of the scroll animation
0.1.3
- Fixed a bug that was breaking pages with multiple widgets in use
- Fixed a bug with the taxonomy filter within the widget
0.1.2
- Announcements now support shortcode in the body text
- Bug Fix: If no announcements are scheduled, the announcment block is hidden
- Announcements can now be filtered by category, allowing you to have multiple types of announcements (e.g. News, Alerts, Events, etc.)
0.1.1
- Added the ability to specify order of the announcements
- Announcement scrolling now pauses on mouseover
0.1
- Initial release
Can the ordered list marker “>” be removed or re-positioned? It appears out of place between the title text and announcement text. Thank you! Fred Sessoms
I have one other oddity. If you go to my site, you can see what I’m talking about.
On this page: http://www.gurucul.com/resources/case-studies-and-testimonials/
Everything looks good. Select one of the case studies that is secured, and take a look at the announcement sidebar widget. The login prompt appears as it should in the main frame, but it also covers the announcement in the widget.
Love this plugin – it does just what I want it to do!! Is there supposed to be facebook & twitter buttons as part of it and can I remove them?
Great plug-in, but I decided to have only 1 announcement after my second announcement didn’t look good scrolling. I deleted the second announcement, but it continues to scroll. It is not on the announcement page and I have even deactivated the plug-in, and then re-started it. I deleted the first announcement as well, re-published it, and you guessed it, the first announcement scrolls twice, followed by the second announcement. Where else do I need to delete the announcements to make them stop? (I did not have a start/end date on any of them.)
Nice plugin, but several issues with widget.
1. Jetpack Plugin – Share Facebook button will not let me turn-off in announcement.
2. All Categories does not work, show nothing when selected.
When I uncheck “Show sharing buttons on this post.” under ‘Sharing’ and click ‘Update’ for an announcement, the checkmark reappears and the sharing button continues to show up. (I’ve only got the announcements set up to show up via the sidebar widget. I don’t want the sharing button to show up there. Is this a bug?
That checkbox isn’t part of my plugin. Can you tell me what sharing plugin you’re using on your site?
Hi Nikki,
I love the way this looks. It’s way better than the other plugins I’m look at.
I see we can only display 1 announcement. Is there a way (or is it coming) to choose how many announcements to display?
Please, please please 🙂
Kirsten
Great plugin. I am trying to display the widget twice on a page (each filtered by a different category). The first one scrolls as expected; however, the second one does not.
Please help.
As I continue to research this…
If I use two shortcodes or two widgets then the first one will scroll properly; but, the second one will not.
If I use one shortcode and one widget (order not important) then both will scroll properly.
Also, I display two announcement scrollers each with a different category filter. My categories are Announcements (ID=502) and Projects (ID=503).
Using the shortcode [announcements tax=503] scrolls annoucements of category Projects as it should. However, using the widget and speciffying Projects as the category actually displays the announcements for category Announcements instead.
Finally, is it posssible to display the category IDs in the Categories list? I had to manually access the database to determine what my category IDs were so I could use the shortcode.
Thanks for your help.
Thanks for the feedback. Version 0.1.3 should fix those issues.
I’ll also look into making the category IDs easier to find. In the mean time, if you want to avoid going into the database, you can click the Edit link next to a category on the Categories page. The ID is part of the URL.
For example you’ll see something like:
yourdomain.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=saw_categories&tag_ID=8&post_type=sched_announcement
The number after tag_ID is the number you want.
Hi Nikki, thanks for the update that I requested. I have added you great plugin into another website and it’s not behaving properly.
I have used the same theme and deactivated all the plugins in case it was one of them causing the problem but it is not working properly.
The website is at:
http://www.elegancedesignerwear.co.uk/
Any ideas why it is not working properly?
Colin
I have used the following code in the header.
I’m not certain on this one. The announcement widget doesn’t appear to be present on either the rendered page or in the the source code at that link.
Hi Nikki
Thanks for this plugin.
I am using the widget to make announcements, but having trouble hiding announcements that I’m not using. If I save them as a draft they still appear in the widget. Also, I programed one to be automatically removed at a set date and it didn’t remove itself. Any thoughts?
Mark
The issue with drafts will be fixed in version 0.1.5.
For the announcement that you tried to schedule, did you set both start and end date, or just the end date? Both have to be set.
Hi there, great plugin, I’m about to use your plugin to schedule flash sale on my online store. I was wondering if there’s any way to set the width to be responsive to the sidebar width since this is a widget?
Dear Nikki, yes this would definitly be awesome and probably would solve the issue I have in the right side of the text message block! I’m using a responsive theme and the announcements does not follow the resizing of the sidebar widgets in different screen resolution. I hope you have the time to consider this in future upgrade.
And I again want to thank you very much because here I’m asking you to do things I do not have the mere idea of how they do works… I’m an user, not a developer, and it is quite simple to write a whishlist as user… 🙂
bo
Yes, the ability to specify the width and height in % and/or em units would be very nice (and shoudl be a fairly simple addition)
thanks!
Thanks for your work Nikki,
For me this is a very useful plugin. I own a yoga studio and being able to list the events like this is really great. Look forward to the “saving drafts” update, this will add even more useful functionality to the plugin.
All the best
Mark
Is there a way to turn off the scroller?
Hi Nikki, great plugin and thanks for sharing!
When I use it in a widget the right side of the text block is cut preventing to show the entire lines of the announcement, near the right side of the widget.
I’ve been playing around margins, paddings, widths and several combination of them, but with no success.
When I use the shortcode in a page I do not have this issue: every line of text is displayed till the end.
Could it be that the puglin interact with my widgets’ margin/padding stated in the theme style.css?
Any idea on how to solve this, keeping my widgets margins/paddings settings?
Thanks for your kind attention and have a serene 2013!
bo
As said above, I’m not a developer, but I’m determined enough not to surrender to some php hieroglyphics…:-) so I tried again and I went for this modification in your php (line 584):
div.saw_announcements.vertical ul#saw_ticker- {
width: px;
height: px;
overflow: hidden;
margin: 0 0 0 -10px;
}
which solved the issue between margin of your announcement plugin and width of my widgets.
I added 10px to width and set the left margin to -10px aligning the announcements to the content displayed in my other widgets.
Thanks for yor attention,
kind regards,
bo
No way to show the complete php modification, because every php tag was automatically removed, for security reason, I guess.
Hi, great plug-in but I’m experiencing a very annoying problem which you can see on this page : http://www.bmhs.co.uk/welcome-2/
The announcements are catching up with each other and overlapping. I have altered settings and speeds to see if that’s where the problem lays, but it does not. Do you know why its doing this?
Cheers
Thanks Nikki for all the work here!
Works great except for one key thing: If an announcement is more text than fits inside the horizontal+vertical space (Settings), the full announcement never scrolls into view so I just see the truncated announcement. 🙁 Is there a trick to get this? So close otherwise!
Unfortunately, it comes down to trial and error. Since the available space has to be exactly the same size for each announcement (otherwise the animation won’t work), the text has to be made to fit that space. That may mean shortening the message, or using a smaller font size.
Hi Nikki
Just wondering how to remove the colon on the announcement titles.
Any thoughts
Mark
You would have to edit the plugin code in scheduled-announcements.php and removed the colons from the following lines:
Line 451:$output .= ''.$msg->post_title.': ';
Line 660:
echo ''.$msg->post_title.': ';
Awesome! Also just wondering what is the best way to turn the scroller completely off? I’m having mixed results with zero, just wondered if you had any thoughts.
Thanks very much
Mark
Hi Nikki
Is there any documentation on how to make the categories work? I have played around with but nothing seems to happen??
Any chance you can explain?
I’m looking to have two events pages with different information, but not sure if it’s possible?
Thanks
Mark
The shortcode [announcements] isn’t working for me anymore. I used a text widget to center to the page but now it displays the shortcode [announcements] instead of the scrolling. The “scheduled announcement” widget does not center to the page the way I would like for different screen sizes. Any thoughts?
Shortcode can’t be used in WordPress text widgets by default. You have to tell WordPress that it needs to recognize them as shortcodes. You can do that by adding:
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');to your theme’s functions.php file.
This is a very nice plugin. The best I could find to meet my need for displaying short messages.
But I have the same problem as Mark Kinder. I want to display different announcements on different author pages. So I gave the announcements categories. The widget is installable, but the announcements are not shown, whatever I do. This would be a very nice feature, but it’s not working at my place (WP 3.7.1.) Can you help me (and Mark Kinder) out on this one?
A new version has just been released that should address 3.7.1 compatibility issues.
Thanx, Nikki, I saw a new field added to the widget. But the category-selection is still not working. If I select a category to show (so I can use different instances of the widget on different pages with category-related announcements) the widget is not shown at all. So it’s all or nothing. This is probably not how you intended it to be?
Good luck with solving this ‘bug’?
Can you let me know what browser/version you’re using? I’ve tested it in Chrome, FireFox, and IE8/9 and can’t replicate the problem.
I am using Chrome too… Perhaps I am looking for the wrong functionality? You use this field to let the widget show only the flagged category from within it’s own list? Yes?
Hello Nikki, My son has fixed your code SAW. The table ID didn’t synchronize in table: term_taxonomy > term_relationships didn’t match. They differed 5.
He added the following code in the only PHP-file:
at Row : 283-286
$tax_ids = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT `posts`.`ID` FROM “.$wpdb->prefix.”posts AS `posts`
JOIN “.$wpdb->prefix.”term_relationships AS `relations` ON `posts`.`ID` = `relations`.`object_id`
JOIN “.$wpdb->prefix.”term_taxonomy AS `terms` ON `relations`.`term_taxonomy_id` = `terms`.`term_taxonomy_id`
WHERE `terms`.`term_id` = “.$tax.”;”, OBJECT_K);
This will do the job.
Hope to hear from you if you agree. Perhaps it didn’t show on your testingmachines because I have a lot more category- and other taxonomy-terms
Greetings from a windy and stormy Holland.
You’re absolutely right. I had that query completely screwed up. 🙂
Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll get it added right away.
I have start end dates on my Scheduled Announcements widget for monthly meetings. Set it all up in June and all seemed well until it reached the current (June)announcement end date. It then began scrolling through all 12 announcements. – (using IE11 and Chrome) Categories work though.
Thanks for the report. I’ll look into it.
Best Plugin ever
Was really pleased at finding this plugin, as it does exactly what I wanted. However, there is a conflict with the WordPress feature picture scroller, in that it stops it scrolling (quite a few plugins cause this problem). Any ideas what causes this and how to fix please?
It’s almost certainly a javascript conflict. What specific picture scroller are you using? There are a lot of them out there.
It’s the slider in the Blue Sport WordPress Theme by produced by WordPressThemesBook.
When using the announcements shortcode on a page, “[protect][/protect]” is displayed prior to the announcement title and, in some cases, after the announcement body. This has only just recently started happening. It works fine for announcements shortcode in widgets. An example can be found on http://SavedByGrace.net under “Featured Content” at the top of the page.
Never mind. The problem mysteriously went away. I do not know what was causing it; but, it is working now.