Feature: Announcement dialog (for holidays, emergencies, etc.)

[fancyham]

Context

Sometimes, we need to display an announcement to all visitors.
This would typically happen around holidays, but might also be used for emergencies.

Examples

• ⚠️Due to fires, some information may be out-of-date
• 🎁Holiday hours may be different from usual. Please contact organizations for their specific holiday schedule.
• ⚠️If you have been affected by the fires, please also visit someurlat.la.gov for more information.

Other sites have a dismissible announcement dialog for these situations, so we are doing something similar. (similar to dialogs that ask you to sign up for a newsletter)

How is it now?

The LA Palisades fires just happened, so we've hard-coded an announcement into the header, but it's clumsy and doesn't great. It is also very limited in text length.

So we want to build something that's more robust, user-friendly, and can handle more text.

Proposed new feature

Using the existing Material Design dialog style, we want to display a dialog when the user first visits the site.

How it works:

• Dialog appears on the user's first screen (regardless of what it is). This dialog appears once per-session. New sessions will see the dialog again.
• Dialog does not appear on the volunteer portion of the site (deep linking into the volunteer portion should not display this dialog)
• Once dismissed, it doesn't appear again until the user starts a new session
• There's a background scrim overlaying the page. Tapping/clicking the scrim dismisses the dialog.
• Tapping 'esc' key on a keyboard dismisses the dialog.
• User needs to tap/Click OK or background scrim to dismiss dialog
• Control panel to edit the announcement text
• Announcement text can have emojis, HTML links, styling that should show up correctly as the dialog text (let us know if that's not possible) This could be done using Markdown or by entering actual HTML code (Markdown would be ideal)
• Settings are per-tenant (e.g. LA might have an announcement active but Hawaii does not)

Control panel

Stretch goal:

Scheduled announcements with start and/or end date. Announcement displays based on the server's date/time, if possible.

Discussion

One issue of this dialog is that people may dismiss it without reading it.

If we find people doing this and missing important information, we may add a link (perhaps near the header) that re-displays the dialog.