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Templates
A template is wording you send again and again: a fire drill reminder, a room change, a note that the shared drive is down. Templates are made by administrators under Message Settings -> Templates, and anyone who can send can start a new notice from one. A template is never a notice: nothing is sent from it, and a person always previews before sending.
What has been tried. Plain templates have been used on a lab server. Templates with blanks are new in 0.5.9 and have not yet been tried in a real browser on a school's own computers. Try one on a small group you can check by eye first.
- Name -- only administrators see it. It is how you find the template in the list.
- Notice title and Message -- the words people will see.
- Default expiry (optional) -- one of the lengths on New notice, or "No default", in which case the form keeps its own.
The Templates tab lists each template with its title, how many blanks it has and its default expiry.
A blank is a gap that the person sending fills in, such as a date, a room or a reason. Under Blanks in this template, add up to 10 blanks. For each one choose a kind:
| Kind | What the sender sees |
|---|---|
| Short text | One line, up to 120 characters |
| Longer text | A box, up to 500 characters |
| Date | A date picker; the notice words it like "Thursday 5 November" |
| Time | A 24-hour time such as 15:30 |
| Choice | A list you write, of up to 20 answers |
Each blank is required or optional, and can have a starting value. Then write {Label} in the title or the message where the
blank goes (the Insert buttons do it for you). Every {Label} you use must be a blank you made, and every blank you made must be used.
For example, a template with the blanks Subject, Date and Room, and the message {Subject} on {Date} is moving to {Room}.
On New notice, choose the template under Start from a template.
- A template without blanks fills in the title, the message and the expiry. You can change anything before you preview, and Courier asks before it replaces words you have already written.
- A template with blanks shows a short form, Fill in the details. As you fill it in, This is what people will see shows the finished notice. An optional blank left empty drops its whole line. A value goes in as plain text, once.
- Edit the words by hand (it asks first) turns the finished notice into an ordinary one.
The template does not choose who receives the notice: you still choose computers or people below, as always, and a sender still sends only to their own audiences. The finished notice is held to the usual limits (120 characters for the title and 2,000 for the message), and the preview and the Send button work exactly as for any notice.
If an administrator changes a template while someone is filling it in, Courier says so and rebuilds the form from the new version, keeping what was typed where a blank still exists.
Nothing records which template a notice came from, and removing a template does not touch notices already sent.
See also Sending a notice and Audiences.