A common request from clients is the ability to manage a simple set of system announcements which can be displayed on the Alfresco Share login page. These might be used to let everyone know about important events like an upcoming system outage or that there are cronuts in the breakroom.

This is a straightforward add-on to write, but I thought it might be useful to others, so I’ve packaged it as an open source add-on available on GitHub.

The idea is simple: When you install the module, it will automatically create a folder in the Data Dictionary called “Announcements”. Administrators will create one plain text file in that folder for every announcement. There is no custom content model or properties to mess with. The content of the file is the body of the announcement.

An Alfresco Share Extension Module does the work on the Share side. When a user opens the Share login page, a Share-tier web script calls a new announcements web script on the repo tier that returns the announcements as JSON. The Share extension formats the JSON response as an un-ordered list that gets injected into the login page between the Alfresco logo and the username/password fields.

When you are ready to take an announcement down an admin can either delete the announcement file or move the file to an arbitrary folder under “Announcements” to save for later reuse.

Some installations–like those with Single Sign-On enabled–never see the Alfresco login screen. For those installations, or for anyone that wants to expose the announcements to logged in users, the add-on also includes an announcements dashlet.

Hopefully you’ll find this useful. If you find issues or want to make enhancements, pull requests are always welcome.