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views:

74

answers:

2
Q: 

Do you know of any Rails "Announcements" plugins?

I've noticed in various web apps that users are prompted with initial announcements to help them use the app for the first time (and users have the option to click "Don't show this message again in the future" or something similar)

Is there a plugin that does that? Or, would you simply program a many-to-many relationship between users and announcements, and maybe have a "disable" boolean column in there, to do that?

+1  A: 

You don't even need a many-to-many for that -- just add a hide_announcement column in your users table and set it to 0 anytime you update the announcement.

bensie  2009-11-25 01:08:20
What if I have multiple announcements for various sections all across the app? Maybe create a column for all sections (something like hide_page1_announcement, hide_page2_announcement, etc)?
sjsc  2009-11-25 01:11:33
Then you should probably go the many to many association route. Be careful though -- imagine the case where someone doesn't login for a long time -- they'll have to clear tons of announcements! That's why the single announcement in the user column works great -- it gets reset so they only see the latest announcement.
bensie  2009-11-25 02:03:22
Thank you bensie! Great recommendations. Thank you!
sjsc  2009-11-25 02:22:07
A: 

I don't know about any plugins for it but you may want to take a look at Ryan Bates screencast about system wide announcements

http://railscasts.com/episodes/103-site-wide-announcements

Peter Theill  2009-11-25 10:20:47

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