Creating a News Item to display on the OPAC or staff side

It is possible to create messages for the staff interface, OPAC and/or circulation slips which will appear for a pre-defined period of time and then be removed automatically.

Navigate to the News tool

Go to the Koha homepage and click into Tools > Additional Tools > News

 

This will bring you to a new page where you will have the option of adding new information to the newsfeed on the staff or OPAC side. Any news that has already been created will appear in a table. 

Create a news entry

To create another News entry, click the +New entry button.

This will bring you to a new page where you can include specific details about the news to be displayed.

Display location:

- Staff interface and OPAC

This will display the news on the homepage of the administrative side of Koha and the OPAC.

- Staff interface

This will display the news only on the homepage of the administrative side of Koha.

- OPAC

This will display the news only on the OPAC.

- Slip

This will allow the news to appear on all circulation slips that may be printed during the specific period, e.g: Hold Slips

Library:

This allows the news creator to limit the news to a specific library branch, however, it is not currently possible to select a pre-defined library group for the news to appear on. If this is set to All libraries the News entry will appear without requiring a login. However, if a specific branch is set, the News entry will only appear on the OPAC or the staff side to patrons logged into the specified branch. 

Publication date:

This is the first date the news will appear in the selected area. This is a required field.

Expiration date:

This is the last date the news will appear in the selected area. After this date the news will be removed.

Appear in position:

If you have multiple news items appearing on the same interface during the same period, this feature can be used to determine in which order they should appear. By placing the number 0 in the box, the news will appear first in a list, placing a 1 will cause it to appear second and so on. 

Title

This will be the heading for the news entry.

Content

The news is entered into this freetext box. The appearance of the message can be customised by the tools across the top of the box.

Example

The example below shows a News item about an Amnesty Day set to display on both the Staff and OPAC side. Once all this is filled out click Save at the top of the page which will save the News. Once the News has been saved you will be brought back to the News table. 

In this example, there are only two pieces of news appearing on the staff side, whereas there are three on the OPAC. This is because the Welcome to Koha News is specified as being for the OPAC, whereas the other two are marked as being for all possible areas.

Staff Side

Any news set to appear on the staff interface will be shown on the left hand side of the screen.

OPAC

Any news set to appear on the OPAC will appear in the middle of the screen. 

Version	Date	Detail	Author
1.0	11/12/19	Document created	Holly Cooper
1.1	13/12/19	Adding details	Holly Cooper
1.2	20/12/19	Adding detail to function	Holly Cooper
1.3	23/12/19	Adding detail to function	Holly Cooper
2.0	18/05/20	Migrated to Zoho	Holly Cooper
2.1	25/01/21	Adding TOC and clarifying language	Holly Cooper
2.2	22/07/26	Updating for newer version of Koha	Holly Cooper

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