If you want to display announcements on your website, including News, Promotions, Reports and Alerts please contact a web administrator to help get this set up for you. Please note this is not related to the site-wide announcements that may appear in your site banner – those are managed by web admins separately.
Once a web administrator has set up the initial structure, you can manage Announcements within your site. You will notice a couple new features on your website:
- An Announcements block option under Add Content
- An _announcements folder
- A new page that feeds all announcements into the body content for you.
- A new section on your home page with the top 3 most recent announcements (Optional)
Tasks (click to navigate to a specific section)
- Adding an announcement (or edit an existing announcement)
- Edit and submit the announcement into Cascade
- Feeding announcements to your new Announcements page and your home page
- Publishing pages with announcements (and auto publish settings)
- Removing or archiving announcements
1. Adding an announcement
Your site's announcements are managed with Blocks. These blocks live in the _announcements folder on your site and feed to multiple areas automatically. Blocks allow you to edit content that exists in many locations but without editing multiple times – the content in a block is used in all locations.
Note: Unlike pages, images and files, blocks are not publishable assets so you will not see a Publish button for these. Only the pages they are fed into will need to publish for your updates to show. So when adding an Announcement block, just Edit > Preview > Submit.
To add a new announcement, click Add Content > Announcement (if this option is not available please contact a web administrator).
To edit an existing announcement, go to your "_announcements" folder in Cascade, find the block you want to update and click "Edit". Then Submit your changes. Again, blocks are not publishable assets so you will not see a publish option.
Go to step to for more info about editing announcements
2. Edit and submit your announcement
There are a few options for editing in your announcement block.
- Placement folder – should automatically have _announcements selected. This is where your block will live once it's submitted.
- Title – your Announcement title/name
- Start Date – (Set to today as a default) When you want your announcement to appear on your website. If you set a future date, the block will be hidden from your site's front-end until that date but is still editable in Cascade. The date you set here will appear as the "post date" for the announcement on the front-end of your site.
- End Date – (optional) When you want to archive the announcement from your site's front-end. If you want to determine this at a later time simply leave it blank. E
- Announcement type (preview below) – Set what type of announcement you want to use from the list.
- News (For recent news, newsletters and updates)
- Alert (For important messages to users)
- Data report (For updates related to numbers/data/analysis)
- Promotion (Raise awareness for an event, initiative or other activity)
- Details – enter the details about this announcement. This content will be hidden until the user clicks the announcement (functioning like our accordions).
Once you have finished editing the content for your announcement you can Preview Draft (just shows a summary of the content you entered) and then Submit.
Once your announcement is submitted, it is then added to the _announcements folder. All announcements will be here regardless of the dates you selected for Start/End date.
Tip: It's a good idea to set a reminder to audit your announcements folder from time to time and delete any blocks you no longer want to use. If you think an announcement could be used again in the future you can always keep it and reactivate it later by setting a new start/end date after the original dates have passed... just be sure to edit any old content first!
3. Feeding announcements into different pages
Announcement blocks feed into a couple areas of your website (as set by the web administrator).
- A "recent announcements" section on your site's home page (optional)
- A page with all live announcements listed
The home page will only show the announcements section (3 most recent) if there are announcements to display.
The Announcements page will list all announcements if there are any to show – if not, a message will appear that says "There are no announcements at this time. Check again at a later date.
As you add new announcements, they should appear in these sections automatically within Cascade.
BUT!
You still need to publish any pages with new announcements so we can push new announcements from Cascade to the front-end of your site. In other words, your announcement is in Cascade but your live site won't show the update until the page it's listed on is published.
See next step for more info on publishing.
4. Publishing pages with announcements / Site publish settings
To update announcement pages with new announcements, find the page that needs to show the announcement and simply click Publish. (No need to edit the page).
Doing this will immediately publish all active announcements to your site.
Publish settings:
But what if you forget to publish the pages after adding an announcement? No worries... we have a Publish Set activated on your site to automatically publish these page at 12am daily. Any new announcements that haven't been published will appear the following day automatically.
But what happens when an announcement reaches the end date?
The Publish settings should take care of hiding announcements that have reached their end date from your site's front-end. The announcement block will still live in your _announcements folder in Cascade, however.
More info about removing announcements can be found in the next step.
5. Removing/archiving announcements
As noted above, if you have set an End Date on your announcement block, your site will automatically remove the announcement from your front-end (live) site when that date arrives.
If you have NOT set an end date and want to remove the announcement, here are your options:
- Delete the announcement by right-clicking and selecting "Delete" (it will go to your trash bin in Cascade)
- Or, Set an end date to remove the announcement from your front-end in the future (But keep it in Cascade)
After you manually remove the announcement from your site, you must publish your announcement pages for the change to take affect. Or, they will be hidden automatically the following day. See step 4 for more info.