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AWSOM News Announcement Version 1.6.0

Download the AWSOM News Announcement 1.6.0 Plugin

For information and instructions on how to set up this plugin please go here. To read the troubleshooting guide go here.

Some of the features of the AWSOM News Announcement plugin for WordPress are:

  • Easy to Install: Just add the plugin to your plugin folder and activate–your News Announcement area is now active without any more effort on your part.
  • Easy to Manage: You can have as many News Announcements as you want saved in your admin area. Turn them on or off when you need to show them. Reuse common announcements and save time. Also, optionally set Authors or Editors as able to manage your News Announcements if you wish. Quickly track how many times your posts have been viewed. You are in control and can see everything from the Admin area in one spot.
  • Easy to Inform: Display your News Announcements to exactly who you want–select from: only Non-registered visitors (excellent to show ads ONLY to people not registered on your site), or any level of registered users (Subscribers, Contributers, Authors, Editors, or Admin only). Keep certain features of your site visible only to a certain level of user (especially good with the run php option so that only certain people can see mp3 or video player modules).
  • Easy to Set and Go: You can set your announcements to display starting on a certain date and ending on a certain date. Great for Ads or Upcoming Events./li>
  • Easy to Update: You can use standard HTML or the new embedded Advanced Visual Editor to add your News Announcement text.
  • Flexible Locations: Besides the default location above your posts on the index page, you can now place the announcement within posts or pages using the code

    Welcome To the AWSOM.org website!

    If you are an Artist, Webcomic Creator, or Blogger looking for help setting up a website, you’ve come to the right place! AWSOM.org can help you get a site up and running quickly with tools, tutorials, and news specifically designed for your needs.

    (BTW, this News area uses the AWSOM News Announcement plugin available from the menu on the left and the drop down archive below is the a result of the AWSOM Archive plugin)

    . These are both in addition to the custom placement option of adding a simple code directly to your theme file to display your News Announcement. With The News Optional Location System you can have up to 8 other specific locations that will only display Posts you set for those locations or posts set to “all locations”.

  • Run PHP: You can optionally run php code from the News Announcement area also, so now any audio or video player (or any other plugin type that uses php code) can run in your news announcement area. Use the AWSOM News plugin anywhere you want to place php or javascript code.
  • Usability Focused: “Edit News Post” link appears on the webpage when an admin or “manage options” level user is logged into the site so you can go directly to the Manage AWSOM News admin page to update your Announcement quickly.

In fact the AWSOM.org news announcement area on the index page of AWSOM.org (“Welcome To the AWSOM.org website!”) uses this module. The future roadmap for this module will be to add support for Time of Day based presentations, along with the possibility of randomly presented announcements (with number of presentations of each cataloged), or announcements placed within the Loop of Posts.

Here’s are images of the Admin Manage page for adding News Announcements:

Awsom News manage page add news
Awsom News manage page news list
Awsom News manage page options

167 Comments

  6. Can’t wait to try this plugin! Why haven’t I tried it yet? It’s taking forever and a day to upload it to my server! :-)

    May I suggest scraping TinyMCE from the plugin install? ;-)

  7. Hi, I would remove the tinyMCE from the plugin, but the default one in WordPress does not play nice with the plugin, so you would lose this functionality from it. I will release a new version soon though that removes some files from the current embedded version which should help reduce the file size/upload time. I may also distribute a “no Visual Editor” version of the plugin for those of you who never use it.

  13. AWSOM News Announcement…

    AWSOM News Announcement allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts (or anywhere else you want) and edit it using the Visual Editor or code editor, all from the WordPress admin area. You can select who sees your posts (only non-r…

  14. Been having trouble with this plugin when it says update available and when I try auto update the plugin altogether disappears. D/l the latest version from here and giving it a go. Its a very useful plugin and does a great job even with banner ads. Great work.

  15. Hi, this is a bug/problem in WordPress itself. It’s actually misreporting that there is an update for this plugin and downloading a *different* plugin and erasing the News Announcement plugin. I need to see why they are flagging things wrongly.

  16. As far as I can see it doesn’t support foreign languages. We run a Chinese radio station and I needed to put an announcement up in Chinese, but just got a load of question marks when the page was displayed. If you could make it support other languages it would make it a lot better for a lot of people… (and let me know when it does! Thanks!)

  17. By default WordPress itself does not support multi-language input, but my plugin is actually neutral and uses whatever the default language type your mysql server is set to use. This is normally utf8. The problem is that there is no universal language field in mysql, so if I choose asian or russian, then english wouldn’t work right or vice versa. The easiest way to handle this is to go to your mysql server and change the language type for the news post field. I’ll write up a tutorial on how to do this and add it to the troubleshooting page.

      • Hi, I assume what you are requesting is a specific tutorial on how to use phpmyadmin to go in and change the language setting for the AWSOM news announcement news post table entries? If so let me know if this is the case and I can whip something up.

        • I already found a way to solve this problem from other resource. This plugin installation will create a database which default set “CHARSET=latin1”. Just make the database .sql file changed to “CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;” is OK. Anyway, thanks your guide, and hope this is helpful.

  18. Thank you very much for answering my comment so quickly, and for writing a tutorial. Such a good response you don’t usually get even for paid services!
    The only quibble I have is, I am using WordPress already and have been writing in both Chinese and English. They both work, but the plug-in still doesn’t display the Chinese characters.

  19. Just what my WordPress blog needed. However I am missing the timestamp of reach news. I wanted to display the date of the announcement.
    Your code is a bit to complicated for me to hack it. May I suggest you include this in the next version?

  20. Peter: How did you get WordPress to display Chinese? Did you use one of the plugins that add this capability? What they typically do is rewrite your basic database fields to the correct language type. Since mine are custom add ons it wouldn’t know to alter those. When I add the database fields to the database I use the generic WordPress command to do this, which picks the standard language type that your database uses. Besides that tutorial (which will be up this week), I’ll see if there is anything else I can do to make this more customizable.

  21. Martin: Hmmm, I normally would have guessed that people would have just added that themselves into their posts since the posts are pretty generic and can be done any way you want. I could easily add this in though, along with a “posted by” statement, which would replicate the way regular WordPress posts are done–I’d make this display optional and set in the admin menu. I’ll add it to the dev list. Thanks for the feedback.

  22. It was a while back when I set it up, and I set it up on the normal WordPress hosted site, but if it asked me when I created the account, “what is the primary language to be used?” then I would have put Chinese in the drop down box. If WordPress doesn’t ask this, then I just set it up normally and wrote the blog in Chinese, (using Microsoft pinyin IME) as I normally write stuff. I don’t use any language plug-ins. In fact a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know what a plug-in was!

  27. Hi everyone

    AWESOME Plug in

    Just to contribute to it… if you want to add styles in a better way than the described here you can add this to your theme’s style sheet… just to make it easier instead off adding a whole line on the admin

    #content .announcement h2 {
    }

    Have a good one

  28. Hi Baalam, I agree that it’s probably a good idea to add in some dedicated css fields to your main theme for the announcement. The theme css setting in the plugin is mostly for people who aren’t very comfortable with editing their files or want a quick way to get an effect.

    Thank you for the feedback and suggestion.

  31. I’m trying to get this to work with FastTemplate which is in use on the site I’ve inherited… I can’t get the news announcement to appear anywhere other than the top of the page, before _anything_ else – any pointers?!

  32. Generally the system used in the News Announcement plugin works with most themese, but in some cases the theme does something non-standard, so that’s where the handy theme code comes in. If you look at the Manage page for the Plugin you’ll see an example of the theme code–turn off the option to display the announcement in it’s default location then add the theme code into your theme where you want the announcement to appear. That’s the system set up in these cases.

  34. Hi, It depends on what you want to do. If you like using the Visual Editor it’s pretty straightforward to embed images using it’s image function. You can center, etc using it. It does not have an uploader function though, so you will need to ftp your images to your server, or link to a place already online with the images.

    If you want to put the display in a specific location other than the default you can use the theme code or post code and turn of the default location–all of this is done from the Manage page for the plugin.

  35. Thanks for a great plugin. It’s been working great for me on many sites.

    I’m having a conflict now with another plug-in. I’ve also posted at that plug in site to see how I can make them work together.

    After I installed the Recent Post plugin, now my page is displaying the ‘%%awsomnews%%‘ instead of the actual news text.

    The Recent Post plug-in uses ‘‘ to display its contents.

    If I remove that tag, then the news post displays properly.

    I’d really like to display both on the page. Is there something about that tag that AwsomNews doesn’t like? Maybe there’s a way I can manually close what it thinks is open?

    You can view the work in progress here: http://www.motherhoodwithattitude.com/blog/home/

    Thanks for your time and a great plugin.

  36. Sorry – the code for the Recent Plug-In didn’t turn out right. It should be ‘<–RecentPosts–>’

    Is there a way to subscribe to the comments to this thread via RSS?

  37. Hi, If you check the box below the comment area when commenting it will automatically send you an email when someone adds a new comment. WordPress does allow rss feeds for pages, but I don’t have that specifically set up for this site.

    My suspicion is that something with the other plugin is not reacting well with mine. Are you using the “run php code” function of AWSOM News? If so it is possible that the technique for doing that reacts poorly with the pseudo html code used by the other plugin. Honestly, it’s a bad idea to use pseudo html code as the embed function for a plugin since WordPress filters that stuff, that’s why I use the %% thing in mine.

    Anyway, I honestly don’t know what I could do to fix things since I am using standard WordPress insertion code to get things to work. In other words, I’m following the rules that WordPress set to do processing. I can’t say if the other plugin is breaking the rules, but since when it’s active mine breaks it might be that it’s doing processing that affects the proper processing of my plugin.

  38. Thanks for the reply.

    I don’t suppose that I could configure the AwsomNews plug in to show an excerpt of the most recent post.

    FWIW, I also posted on the RecentPosts plug in page, but haven’t gotten a reply yet:

    I’ve been playing around with it, moved it to a different spot on the page, etc, but the only thing that brings back the news announcement is removing the tag and of course, I don’t want to do that.

    If I replace with the HTML generated, the news announcement displays fine. So it’s not the output itself, but something that must still be open/active during the call to Recent Posts that is not allowing the AwsomNews plug in to be recognized?

  40. Great tool!!! works like a charm.
    i have a questions:
    Now the newest newsitem appears below the older ones. Can I alter this?

    Secondly, is there a place where i can alter the css of the displayed items?

  43. Oh, the “titles” for news posts in the admin area are actually not for visitors to see, they are there for you to see so you can tell which news post is which. They aren’t displayed on the page, only the contents of the news post itself. Sorry for the confusion.

  45. I love this plugin but it consistently stops working. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I did it manually and then i tried with the Awsom Uninstaller. I tried reverting to awsom news 134, and then to 141, which tells me to automatically upgrade to 144 which then crashes and I’ve tried 145 – no matter what i do now, the advanced visual editor which i need does not show up. Please help!! I am using the latest version of WordPress, i think that 2.6?

  46. Hi Marina,
    first thing, never use the autoupgrade feature in WordPress–it does not work consistently and can screw up your site.

    Now, let’s try an experiment. first delete the awsomnews folder on your server. Then re-upload the newest version.

    Next, de-activate all other plugins and switch to the default wordpress theme. Activate the Awsom News plugin. Now, does it work right? If so then there is some kind of comflict with another plugin or your theme. Turn on your plugins one at a time and see when the Awsom News plugin stops working, then we know what the problem is.

  47. Just what I was looking for! This excellent plugin works perfectly well in my 2.6.1, and I sure hope it will work as well when 2.7 gets more stable. Will it?
    (I am using your 1.4.5, on WordPress you are listing the 1.4.4)
    Anyway: Thank you!

  48. Hi John,
    Thank you. I’ve received one report that the current version does not work correctly with 2.7 (and also that 2.7 was crappy :) ) but I’ll release a new version with a fix if this is true. I usually wait until the official release until I release a new version since the changes between betas can be large.

  50. Hi Maida,
    I assume what you want is to have the size of the News area set to a certain height, and have it scroll if the content is longer than theat height. The easiest way to do this is to add a CSS statement to the Manage area for AWSOM News with a height attribute. so putting height:90px; or something along those lines into the CSS box (with whatever other CSS you want as well) should set the box to a specific height and add scroll bars.

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