A sitewide message is a way for Admins and Moderators to inform community users of news, events, and any other important information you want to share. You can control where in your community these messages display.
Examples
As you can see, you can add basic HTML to these messages, including bold, links, images, and more.
📝 NOTE: Before a sitewide message is rendered, any included HTML is filtered. This is done to fix any malformed elements, and to help protect your site against any potential security issues. With this in mind, if you include more complex HTML, that code may be removed in the final version of the message.
Required permissions
To manage sitewide messages, a user must belong to a Role with the following permissions:
Garden > Community > Manage Garden > Moderation > Manage
Check out the article below to learn how to access and manage your Roles and permissions.
Manage your sitewide messages
To access your sitewide messages:
- Access your Dashboard.
- Navigate to Moderation > Site > Messages.
Here, you can enable/disable, edit, and delete your existing messages.
Create a message
- Click Add Message.
- Configure the fields below, and then click Save.
Configuration options
- Appearance: Select one of four appearance options: Casual, Information, Alert or Warning. Each has a unique colour (set in your base theme) and distinct CSS Classes you can override in your Custom Theme.
- Message: Enter the message text. You can include basic HTML but no JavaScript. (If you need that for ad code, check out Pockets.)
- Page: Select where in your community your message will display. You can have it display on all pages or just a specific page.
- Position: It can appear above content or on the sidebar.
- Category: In addition to displaying on a specific page (or all pages), you can also display your message in a specific Category or all Categories. You can also check the Include Subcategories box, if desired.
- Dismissable: If toggled on, logged in users can dismiss the message (it will no longer display for them). It will continue to display for Guests and users who don't dismiss it.
✔️ TIP: When a sitewide message has been dismissed by a user, it will never display to that user again. Because of this, we recommend not making important messages dismissible.
- Enabled: Use this toggle to determine whether the message is visible in your community.
Communication is key, but don't overdo it
While these messages are a great way to communicate important information to your community, numerous messages in a short span of time will likely frustrate your users. With this in mind:
- Make sure your community managers are working together and have a schedule for what messages to display (and when).
- Have a community manager regularly review your messages and keep only the most recent/important ones.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
