Announcements Ticker in Course Page

[Jeremy Hopkins]

I notice a lot of users are popping announcements out of the grid in order to display them more prominently. This does not look good as they then appear at the top of every course section.

To avoid staff doing this there are two options:

1) Improve the block region settings in course pages so that the blocks appear in the main content region as opposed to being above the sidebar. This would allow us to add a news slider at the top of the course page. Another issue would then be preventing it displaying in individual sections, and how well that would work when there were no posts which will happen in course pages

2) Another option would be to build something based on the "announcements ticker" already in the theme which is more discrete, could be rendered only in the front page of a course and could be set to only display if announcements were found. This I think would be the better of the two options.

If we do this ideally we would want it to be available by the end of November ready for the next semseter.

[Manoj Solanki]

While the ticker is discrete, I wonder if it might be worth enhancing the news slider to do this? I think it would look better too. It might be possible to prevent it displaying on individual sections. It could also just display the standard "No new announcements" type message if there are no unread announcements.

What do you think?

[Jeremy Hopkins]

I originally thought the news slider would be the way to do it and it would certainly look nicer but i am not sure we woudl want to enable the block region by default particularly as it would be a site wide setting and not something we could only apply to templated modules.

If there are no announcements to display we dont want empty divs gobbling up space at the top of all our course pages.

If when there is no content to display it does not create whitespace then it woudl be an option.

Even then I think we would still want it positioned next to the sidebar as opposed to being above it, but that could be achieved with a new setting in the course formats page to adjust the position the existing top blocks display in.

[Jeremy Hopkins]

... or just add another block region specifically for this with a check box to enable / disable.

That would probably be easier particularly if we want to hide it on inner sections.