The News Announcement Scroll plugin, now available on the Commons, can be used in both sidebars and on posts and pages to highlight and broadcast news. An example of the plugin at work can be seen below, with three of its various configurations:
To write and control your news bulletins, go to Settings>>News Announcement Scroll. Here you can access two screens: Text Management and Gallery Settings.
When you first go to the Text Management screen, you will see three test announcements the plugin author has supplied. You may delete or edit these according to your needs. Clicking on “Edit” brings the new item’s content into the edit box, at the top of the screen, where you can modify it. You can enter HTML and manually add links, images, and styles as needed. You can create groups of announcements, and display them in separately on your site. Here is a screen shot of the Text Management screen, after clicking on the “Edit” hyperlink for the second item (the edit box is circled in red):
In Settings Gallery you will see the following fields that control the way your news announcement will appear. Changes to these will affect all the groups display:
To insert the News Announcement Scroll in a page or a post, use the following shortcode, where the type you want to display is “widget” (change this accordingly):
More commonly, users will want to put news broadcasts in their sidebar. To do this, drag the News Announcement Scroll widget over to your sidebar and click save. All the configurations for the widget are maintained in Settings>>New Announcement Scroll.
