Drupal Announcements

Use of the Announcements view on the Drupal IT site is fairly straight forward. Any logged in user can add an event, and it will appear on in a formatted table on the front page of the site.

Location

• The Announcements view is located on the front page of the ERI IT Drupal site: http://it.eri.ucsb.edu/

Structure/Advanced

Event

• The Announcements view displays content of type = "Announcement"
  • The fields within each "Announcement" are Title, Body, and Date
    • The date must be a single day event, but the user may select a specific time for sorting or informational purposes
• The content is displayed in a table within a block view titled "Announcements"
  • The block appears in the content region below "Main Content"
• The "Date" and "Body" fields are displayed within the table

Outage

• Currently, there isn't an easy tool for formatting an "Outage" in the table
  • Ultimately, we need a php script or module that will generate html to format an "Outage Event"
    • Possible solutions:
      • We might be able to do a Webform that formats text and sends the resulting HTML code to user for input into "Event" field.
        • Can only be directed to static email address. Markup can only be done to variables that are set before form is displayed (eg. user, current time etc.)
      • Make a module that intercepts Content Addition, and formats various fields into one formatted "Body"
        • Use 'drupal_form_submit' to add node to "Announcements" from form data.
        • Inserts it into database as a normal "Event"