Special alert

A Special alert displays at the top of pages you specify, surrounded by a red border. You may only have one special alert active on a site at a time. A special alert should be approved by the website lead first and only users with the site manager role may create special alerts.

Below is how the special alert will display.

screenshot of special alert

Special alerts should ONLY be used to convey urgently important information.

Creating a Special alert

  1. From the administration bar, select Workbench, and then select My Dashboard.

  2. Navigate to the Content types panel and select Add/edit beside Special alert.

    Screenshot of Add and edit button beside Special alert
  3. In the uWaterloo Special alert configuration window, check the box beside Display this alert.

  4. Enter a concise alert message in the Special alert message block. Make sure to delete the placeholder text.

  5. The Pages block determines which pages the alert will be visible on.

    • To only display the Special alert on the homepage, enter <front> in the pages field.

    • To display the Special alert on all pages of your site, enter /* in the pages field or leave it blank.

    • To limit the pages on which the Special alert appears, enter the URL paths, one path per line. You may use a backslash and asterisk (/*) to include all the items under a single path.

      • For example, to display the alert on the News page and all news items except the news item with path 'exclude':/news/news/*

      • /news - includes the News page and not any news items./news/* - includes all the news items under News, but does not include the News page itself.

  6. Select Show for the listed pages for the alert to show for all the pages listed in the pages field. Select Hide for the listed pages to hide the alert for all the pages listed in the pages field.

  7. Select Save configuration to save the alert.

Note: The URL path is the characters that are displayed after the backslash of the site e.g. www.uwaterloo.ca/example-site/path.

Removing a Special alert

To remove a Special alert, you will need to unpublish it.

  1. From the administration bar, select Workbench, and then select My Dashboard.

  2. Navigate to the Content types panel and select Add/edit beside Special alert.

  3. Uncheck the box beside Display this alert.

  4. Select Save configuration.