Feature Wiki

Information about planned and released features

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Hide News Older than X Days

Page Overview

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1 Initial Problem

The current implementation of the News block in ILIAS offers two options:
  • Either a news is displayed forever - and this means you get presented information about files uploaded five years ago
  • Or ILIAS shows only news that have been created after day X - which makes it necessary to change this date from time to time (and who remembers this?).
What is really missing is a setting that allows you to define how long a news is shown - or in other words: an option for the lifecycle of a news item.

This feature request is related to the request Centralising News Settings.

2 Conceptual Summary

A course or group admin should be able to configure the News block in a way that it either shows the news of the last X days or the news since day Y. This should be clearly indicated by the settings menu.

The existing and implicit default 'All news are shown' should become an alternative option to the existing 'Show News After' option. The new label would be 'Show News Not Older Then' followed by an nummerical input for days. To keep the existing behaviour of showing all news, a 'Show all' link should be added after the oldest news entry. This might only be needed when someone really wants to see historical news of the course or group (which IMHO happens quite seldom).

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

  • Course » Settings » News Settings
  • Course » Content : block News : dropdown entry Settings

3.2 User Interface Details

The following mock-up relies on the suggestion of Centralising News Settings.

Comment: If 'Show News After Date' is activated, an additional date input is displayed (like already known from the current implementation).

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

No new interface concepts suggested

4 Technical Information

No technical issues.

5 Contact

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

7 Discussion

Killing, Alexander [alex], 23 May 2016: I fully support this request.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], June 06, 2016: We highly appreciate this request and schedule it for 5.2.

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], September 19, 2017: Feature request has been adapted to new feature wiki page template and extended accordingly.

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], September 25, 2017: Usually, we are defining options in a positive was, e.g. "Show all news...". But when I had a look again on my suggestions above I thought that the feature is about hiding old stuff and so the options should also address 'hiding' instead of 'showing'. Alternative labels would be (old label suggested above → new label):
  • Period if News → Hide Old News
  • Show News Newer Than Life Span → Hide News Older Than Defined Life Span
  • Show News After Date → Hide News Before Defined Date
And how about forgetting a 'Show all' option? Does anyone really wants to see all news that have ever been created in a course or group? I wouldn't miss it.
AT, 2017-09-25: Alternative suggestions for labels in accordance with the "Positive labels only"-rule
  • Period if News → Recency or Novelty 
  • Show News Newer Than Life Span → Max. Age of News 
  • Show News After Date → All News Starting From 

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], September 25, 2017: We highly appreciate this feature request and schedule it for 5.4. We would like to make the two option 'Max. age of News' and 'News Starting from' two separate options (checkboxes) to allow a combination of both. This is especially important when starting a course or group and file uploads and other course creation activities should not appear to users but only activities during the course lifetime.

Sesterhenn, Fabian [sesterhenn], 29.06.2018: Will it still be possible to show all news by default, regardless of age/date, without the need to click a "show all news" link?

8 Implementation

Feature has been implemented as part of Centralising News Settings for ILIAS 5.4. See linked page for more information.

Last edited: 19. Apr 2023, 12:27, Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]