Pop-up Messages
Pop-up messages are windows that display in front of a web page when it loads. These documents can be simple text-only messages or they can contain text, images, and links to other pages or other websites. Used for special announcements or emergencies, these can be a very effective way to ensure that every visitor to your website gets the same message when they arrive at least once.
Regardless of the content of the pop-up, there is a hard-coded button that will be included allowing the user to choose not to show the pop-up again (because once they have seen the message, they need to be able to choose to not continuously have to see and close the message each time they refresh the web page. The “Don’t Show Again” button will close the pop-up and, if the person has agreed for their browser to store a cookie from Websby, that message will never display again unless the user clears the cookie out of their browser’s cache.
Cookies
Cookies are small files that Websby “drops” to the local computer of the web visitor. The file contains code that tells Websby that a particular browser has seen the pop-up message and chosen not to see it anymore, in which case, Websby does not display the pop-up message when the page loads. The pop-up will continue to display each time the page loads if there is no cookie on that person’s browser. In the past, web developers had no restrictions regarding cookies and they were routinely dropped in people’s browsers without consent. The problem with cookies is that they can be used to store many things, like personal preferences, patterns of behaviour on the web, and even passwords, making people open to exploitation by hackers.
To conform with laws around the world for privacy protection, whenever a page has an active pop-up message to display, Websby will “ask” the person visiting the site if they will allow Websby to drop its cookie on that computer. If the person clicks the “Accept” button in the message displayed by Websby, then the cookie is written to that computer and will remember that the person has seen the popup message and will not further bother them with it.
If, however, the person chooses to decline to accept the cookie, both the request pop-up and the page pop-up itself will continue to show each time the user refreshes the page.
Using Pop-ups
In order to use pop-ups in your website, there are several steps to take, and several hard-coded elements that need to be understood.
First, before pop-ups can be used at all, a Webmaster must activate them in the site configuration form. The control for this is on the site config form in the General Site Settings section.
The Website Page Pop-ups Policy is drop down list that, by default, is set to “Disable all pop-ups” but can be changed to prevent all pages except the home page from having page-specific pop-ups. Messages displayed on the home page can still be broadcast to all sub pages if the broadcast option is active.
The final setting will allow any page to have a pop-up specifically for that page which will display only when a browser resolves that page. Regardless of the settings for a specific page, an all-page broadcast set by the Web Manager or Webmaster will override them and the school-wide pop-up will display.
Pop-up messages are nothing more than Edsby Documents that have been selected to be a pop-up message. This is done in the Web Page Setup form for any page. The root Web Page has a slightly more complete set of options, and there is an additional Broadcast checkbox in the root web page setup form that allows the Web Manager or Webmaster to force the same popup message to appear when any page in the site is loaded.
Required Steps to Create and Activate a Pop-up Message
Styling and Customization of Pop-ups
When working in the Web Page Setup form, there are number of options to configure the pop-up message. You can set the message window to appear in any of the 9 parts of the screen – top left, top center, top right, middle left – etc.
You can also apply an opacity setting that will, when set to less than 100%, make the pop-up message more transparent as the number decreases. This has a pleasant effect that you can experiment with.
You can also constrict the width of a pop-up message either as a percentage of the normal width the document would display, or as a specific pixel value
While there are some styling options in the document itself, a document configuration form may be used to style the document much more powerfully. Font choices, colors, background colors and even background images can be applied to the whole pop-up window (these must be uploaded to the Site Images folder first).
Once you have defined a Document configuration form, making sure that the “Available to Users” check box is checked, and saved it, that configuration form will now be listed in the drop-down list on the Web Page Setup form in the “Document configuration form to use” field. Once selected, the configuration form will now be used to style the pop-up message.
The Document Style Configuration form for a pop-up message is used exactly like elsewhere in Websby except for the fact that the Heading 5 and Heading 6 fields are used to style the button that will appear on the pop-up message. Heading 5 can be any font defined in the website with an optional override of the font for color and size.
Heading 6 is used to define the background color of the button, so if you choose a font and do not override the default, then the button will take on background color of the font used, but the font face has no effect. You can use the “Override Default Font” checkbox to define any color you wish.
Styling the Cookies
The pop-up message that asks the web visitors if they will accept a cookie is hard- coded by Websby with a message about what is being requested, and with a link to Websby’s privacy policy web page. This document can also be customized. If you wish to have a custom message explaining why the site uses cookies, or one that links to your own privacy policy (recommended), then you need only to create a document in the root web page specifically called “Cookies”. If that document exists, it will be displayed instead of the default pop-up.
