Site Notices

A site notice is the banner that warns visitors the hub is going down for maintenance, or that something is broken. It is not a component — it is the mod_notices module, and you post a notice by editing that module.

You need one perhaps four times a year: a scheduled outage, a storage migration, a tool that has stopped working while you find out why, a change of address. The value of a notice is that it stops the support queue filling up with fifteen tickets about the same outage, so post it before the work starts rather than after somebody notices.

One notice at a time

There is nothing stopping you publishing several notices in the notices position at once, and nothing sorting out what happens when you do — they stack, all of them, on every page. In practice keep one module and edit it, rather than creating a new one for each event. Give it a title you will recognise later, like Site notice, and change its message.

Finding the module

1. Log in to /administrator.
2. Go to Extensions → Module Manager.

3. Find the notices module. Filter by position, type, or state, or type notices into the search box. The module's type is mod_notices and it belongs in the notices position.
4. Click the module's title to edit it.

If no such module exists yet, select New, pick Site Notices from the module type list, and set its position to notices.

Details

Most of the Details fieldset can be left alone. Two fields matter:

• Position — must be notices. Every stock template (hubzero, kimera, lucent) declares that position; nothing renders the module anywhere else.
• Start Publishing and Finish Publishing — the window during which the notice appears. Leave either empty for no bound. These are the module's own publishing dates, in the Details fieldset, not module parameters.

Also in Details: Status (published or unpublished), Access, and Ordering. A notice that is unpublished never shows, regardless of its dates.

Parameters

The notice's content and appearance live in the module's Basic options:

Parameter	Label	Default	What it does
message	Message	empty	The notice text. HTML is allowed
alertlevel	Alert level	low	low, medium, or high. Sets the banner's colour class
moduleid	Module ID	empty	A CSS id put on the module's container, for per-notice styling. It is also the name of the dismissal cookie — see below
allowClose	Allow closing	No	Gives the notice a close link
autolink	Autolink message	Yes	Turns bare URLs and email addresses in the message into links

Alert level becomes a class name on the wrapper — modnotices low, modnotices medium, modnotices high — and the template decides what each one looks like. High is the loud one. Use it for an outage happening now and low for one announced a week ahead; a hub whose every notice is high trains people to ignore the banner.

Allow closing stores the dismissal in a cookie named after Module ID, falling back to sitenotice. Two consequences worth knowing. Changing Module ID on an existing notice gives it a new cookie name, so everyone who dismissed it sees it again. And two notices sharing a Module ID share a dismissal.

The dismissal has a lifetime. With a Finish Publishing date set, it lasts until that date, so the notice cannot come back after it has expired anyway. With no end date, it lasts seven days and then the notice returns.

Substitutions in the message

The message text is scanned for five tags, which are replaced with the module's own publishing dates. They save you retyping the window into the prose, and they stay right if you move the outage.

Tag	Becomes
<notice:start>	The Start Publishing date and time, as 9:00 AM, Mar 3rd, 2026
<notice:end>	The Finish Publishing date and time, in the same form
<notice:countdowntostart>	Time remaining until the start — in 2 days, 3 hours, 15 minutes, or starting immediately
<notice:countdowntoreturn>	The same, counted to the finish date
<notice:timezone>	Nothing. See the warning below

So a maintenance notice can read: The hub is unavailable for scheduled maintenance <notice:countdowntostart>, returning at <notice:end>.

Menu assignment

The Menu Assignment tab decides which pages show the notice:

Option	Effect
On all pages	Everywhere. This is what a maintenance notice wants
No pages	Nowhere — the notice is effectively off
Only on the pages selected	Just the ticked menu items
On all pages except those selected	Everywhere but the ticked menu items

Save with Save or Save & Close.

Taking it down

Nothing takes a notice down for you unless you set Finish Publishing when you posted it. If you did not, come back and set Status to Unpublished. A stale maintenance notice about work that finished last month does more harm than no notice at all — visitors stop reading the banner, and the next real one goes unread.

For a planned outage, set both dates when you write the notice: Start Publishing a day or two ahead so people see it coming, and Finish Publishing at the end of the window. Then it appears and disappears without you.