Alert Box Homepage Feature

You have various homepage features that you can control on the website. The following are instructions for manipulating the Alert Box homepage features.

The Alert Box feature (which may be called “Breaking News” or “News Alert” or something similar depending on your website’s design theme) is a feature on the homepage that displays one item that is timely and newsworthy with an eye-catching display treatment. It can be announcing a new town hall event or a press release mentioning legislation just sponsored by the member. By default, the feature should be disabled and used on an as needed basis. It’s possible that the feature may never be used, but it’s there in case the need arises. Any page that is created in the content manager can be inserted into the Alert Box feature.

There are a couple of ways to insert a page into the feature. You can navigate to the page on the website while you are in the content manager. You will notice that beneath the page title there is a tab called “Nodequeue” beside “View” and “Edit”. Click on the “Nodequeue” tab, and you will see a table that contains a column called “Operation”. Click on the link to “Add to Queue” to add the page to the Alert Box. You will see the link name will change from “Add to Queue” to “Remove From Queue”. The page should now appear in the Alert Box feature. You should see the page title in the feature linked to the full page.

To remove the page from the feature, you can go back to the page, click on the “Nodequeue” tab and click on the “Remove from Queue” link in the “Operation” column. The “Nodequeue” tab will also appear while you are editing a page, and works the same way.

There is another way to manage what page will appear in the Alert Box feature. The Alert Box is a Nodequeue, like the Home Page Feature Rotator. In the black horizontal navigation bar, you can hover over “Structure” and click on “Nodequeues”, then click on the “View” link for the Alert Box.

You can add a new item to the Alert Box by entering the title or part of the title of a page you want to appear in the Alert Box feature inside the field that says “Enter the title of a node to add it to the queue”. The Content Manager should provide a dropdown list of suggested pages approximating that title. Highlight the appropriate suggestion and click on the “Add Content” button to add the item to the Alert Box queue.

The Alert Box will only display the one topmost item. Under “Operations”, click on the “Remove” link to remove any old items. You can also click on the “Edit” link to go directly to an item in the queue to make edits to it. Remember to click “Save” or your changes will not be saved.