Hello John,

Is the group public or private? If you have posted an announcement on a public group, it should also display the announcement on the dashboard. As for the edits, it shouldn't actually generate a new stream item whenever you edit an announcement. To fix this, download the attached file and upload it into /media/com_easysocial/apps/group/news/controllers/news.php

Hi Mark,

For the first issue, please visit a full copy of my live site to see how announcements are not generating stream items. Please login and see the link provided to a group's announcements. Then go to the dashboard page > CFB Contests group filter. You'll see there is no stream generated for the three announcements posted in the group. And they were not deleted.

For the second issue, I am not saying that a new stream item is being generated every time an announcement is edited. I am saying that whenever you edit an announcement, new system and email notifications are generated after the announcement is initially posted. This can create a bunch of unnecessary and spammy notifications to users if you need to make some edits and clean it up after the initial post. To solve this, I would prefer a check box be present in the announcement edit view that can be unchecked to prevent notifications from being sent after saving it. That way we can control if we feel members need to be notified of the changes being made to the announcement.

Hello John,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply, I think I may have misunderstood you earlier and I was able to replicate this locally. The issue here is the announcements aren't being generated on the dashboard and it was actually by design as we only display announcements of the group within the group itself.

We'll see how we can optimize this in the near future as it is a little tricky to get this work as we would have to have 2 different apps to manipulate this.

I'm sort of surprised that announcements would not be included in the stream because it seems the other group apps like discussions are included in the stream. I honestly thought it was a bug of some sort. If you guys can manage to include announcements in the stream it would be REALLY helpful because announcements in the groups on my site contain the most important information that people need to see and most users start navigation from the dashboard.

My question is, if discussions are included in the stream, why can't announcements be in the same way? Does that take two apps?

On that related note...I noticed that discussions in the stream do not take on formatting so it looks like a big block of text and links are not parsed. Any chance that formatting can be included to make it easier to read?

BTW, I'm looking forward to trying ES 1.3 but been way too busy to check out the beta yet. Congratulations on the new release! It must feel great to have that out.

Hello John,

Noted, appreciate your insights on this and I was also a little puzzled when finding out about announcements not appearing on the dashboard. There's a really tricky situation on how we display stream items on the dashboard versus displaying the streams within a group.

The problem is more like having multiple apps to display different streams at a different perspective. For instance, what you see on the stream at the dashboard is not always the same when you are viewing it on the group. Example:

In Group's perspective (view):

Title: John update the group's photo

In Dashboard's perspective (view):

Title: John update the photo of the group "Group A"

As for the formatting of the discussions on the stream, this is also another tricky situation. If you are truncating the contents of the stream, it's almost close to impossible to truncate html tags. The only way to retain the html tags is when you disable truncation but that also leaves another issue when the stream becomes extremely lengthy.

We are currently experimenting with a new truncation technique in 1.3 so that the words doesn't truncate at explicit characters but instead it truncates between boundaries of words. For instance, if the configuration is set to truncate at 250 characters, it doesn't necessarily mean that it truncates to 250 characters exactly, it could be 253, 245, 260 depending on the words used in the sentence.

Thanks for considering my inputs. Hopefully you all figure out a way to include these items in a future version. The truncation does sound tricky. Exploring word boundaries sounds like the right idea. Would that include a way see line breaks, though? The main thing I noticed is it's difficult to read w/o line breaks. What about html tag boundaries instead of word boundaries?

Hello John,

Noted, I am trying to see if I can quickly add this into 1.3.0 beta 3. As for the truncation, it doesn't take into consideration with line breaks because line breaks generally does not contain any text within.

Hi Mark,

Thanks so much for adding group announcements into the stream! Very helpful!!! Only problem I see with it now is, every time you edit an announcement and save, it creates a new stream item (see the link I added in site details). This may be why a new notification is sent every time you edit/save an announcement? It would be great if we could knock out two birds with one stone by preventing new stream items and new notifications after editing an announcement. For notification on edit, my recommendation is still to add a check box in the announcement edit view that can be unchecked to prevent notifications from being sent after saving it. That way we can control if we feel members need to be notified of the changes being made to the announcement. Usually I just have to correct some minor errors and fix links and it is a little annoying to get a new notification each time.

Also, is there a way to hide the events filter on the left side navigation of the stream? I have disabled events for now and would like that filter menu to not display.

Wow, you guys are fast....looks good now and doesn't even send new notifications after editing. Thanks a ton Mark!

P.S. I'm finding some goodies in ES 1.3 as if you guys were reading my mind on things I would like such as putting the about information on profiles and groups on the stream itself with a filter link to each page. You guys rock house!!

You are most welcome John Thanks for updating !