[Building Sakai] Public announcements from Admin Workspace not possible?

[John Leasia]

The 'motd' tool in the admin site, which is used to create 'message of 
the day' messages, is really the announcement tool tuned to a special 
channel  - motd.
So if you look at the motd tool in the admin site (site id !admin), 
using the Admin Sites tool to edit the page and then edit the tool, 
you'll see the channel specified. For that channel, the announcement 
tool acts special since those messages are public and there's no way to 
make them not so. But if you go add another Annc tool to the admin site, 
and leave it's channel blank by default, then it is using the default 
channel for a site, and the Access controls show up (at least they do in 
our 2.6.2 version).

There is another tool - sakai.motd - that is used to view the messages 
created by the announcement tool tuned to the 'motd' channel. That 
sakai.motd tool is the one typically found on the gateway page to 
display the motds.

Guessing - there must be some coding in Announcements to know if the 
channel is motd, and if so, force it to be public with no option to change.

John

Steve Swinsburg wrote:
> Does anyone have any insight into this?
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>
> On 02/07/2010, at 4:45 PM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
>
>    
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone know why Public Announcements are not possible from the Admin Workspace? When adding an announcement I do not get the Public/Site option, just an empty 'Access' section. Examining the source, shows that the parameter 'announceTo' is hardcoded to be site only. I don't think this is new, nor a bug, I've just never noticed it before.
>>
>> We want to be able to publish Announcements that go to the MOTD synoptic tool so appear in user's My Workspaces, but also make the same announcements available from the RSS feed that the Announcements tool provides, but it only picks up public announcements, so this won't work.
>>
>> We can broadcast public announcements from any other site but would really like to be able to do it from the Admin Workspace. There must have been some reason why this capability was restricted?
>>
>> thanks,
>> Steve
>>      
>