Announcement plugin for IBM Connections

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Author: Christoph Stoettner
Read in about 2 min · 327 words
Customizing HCL Connections

Fountain pen and a notebook

Photo by Aaron Burden | Unsplash

Last week i searched a way to send all Connections users an information on important updates, which should be configurable and uses cookies to hide it for a specific time.

First i had a look at the Greenhouse Announcement Widget which is used within Greenhouse .

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Quite nice, but i had problems with IE 9 users and the popup appears on each page you open within Connections. So i tried something other.

After some searching i found a script of Ollie Phillips which is originally used to inform users about Cookie usage on the site. Ollie published the cookiesDirective.js under the MIT License. When you find the announcement slider useful, please buy him a beer .

I took the script and put it to a osgi bundle and added some configuration parameters.

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If you want to test it,

announcement-osgi

, please use the updated archive! Download link see last point in this post!

Installation

Unarchive the package and copy de.stoeps.announcement_1.0.0.jar to your Connections customization folder/provision/webresources and the folder de (and all content below) to customization/javascript.

The text which is shown within the slider can be edited within customization/javascript/de/stoeps/announcement/popup.txt. You can use html code and links within this text file. So you can add links to additional informations.

Background color backgroundColor: '#CACACA', button text (buttonTextPre & buttonTextPost) and opacity (set backgroundOpacity: '99' to show a solid color) is configured in customization/javascript/de/stoeps/announcement/initialize.js

The announcement can be disabled with announcementEnabled: 'false'.

cookieLiveTime: 2 set the cookie to 2 days, so your users get the announcement again after 2 days and must confirm with the button.

After installation and after changes in initialize.js you must restart Common Application.

Update

Klaus and Rainer mentioned problems with german language within the browsers. So i renamed the plugin from de.stoeps to org.scripting101.

Please use the following archive to install the announcement osgi plugin!

announcement-osgi-1.0.1

Installation and customization is nearly the same, only the path within customization/javascript changes from de/stoeps to org/scripting101!

Thanks for testing guys.

Author

Christoph Stoettner

I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.

Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .

I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.

In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.

This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.

           

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