Notification banners are useful when we need to communicate an important message or change to help center visitors. Examples include system outages, important announcements, and high-profile feature changes or new releases.

The following steps detail the process of creating, editing, and removing notification banners for the edX Help Center.

• Create a notification banner
• Edit a notification banner
• Remove a notification banner

Create a notification banner

To create a notification banner or alert, you create an article that contains the alert's heading and contents, add a custom label, and publish the article. 

Create the article

1. Log in to Zendesk.
2. In the upper right corner, select  , then select Guide. The Themes page appears.
3. In the upper left corner, select Add, then select Article. 
4. In the left hand pane, enter the alert heading in the Title area, and add any additional content that will appear in the alert message banner. Note that banners appear on all supported devices, including smartphones. Keep the content as brief as possible to clearly convey your message.
5. Use the appropriate formatting options for the alert banner. For information on formatting, see Style guidelines for help articles in Guide. Here is example formatting of how the article title and article body appear in a live alert banner on a smartphone and a desktop:
   
    .         
   
   
6. In the right hand pane, enter the following:
   1. Under Publish in section, select a category and section for the article to be associated with. While the alert banner appears on the home page only, the article will also be included in whichever category and section you select.
   2. Deselect the checkbox Open for comments.
      Note: This is selected by default and allows commenting on articles that we are presently not staffed to moderate.
7. Select Save. This saves the article to a Work in Progress state, but does not publish your alert banner.
8. Select Preview to preview the alert banner and article in the help center.
9. Repeat steps 3-7 with Spanish content to create the companion Spanish alert banner that will appear on the Spanish edX Help Center home page.

Create the alert label

1. The trigger for adding the alert is a custom label. In the right hand pane, in Labels, add the following:
       alert-en-US to the English article
       alert-es-419 to the Spanish article
2. Select Save.

Publish the alert

1. When you are ready to add the alert banner to the home page of the help center, in the article, select the dropdown arrow next to Save and select Publish.
   This automatically publishes the article and adds it to the live help center on the home page.

Edit a notification banner

There may be times when you need to update an existing alert message article and publish the changes immediately - for instance, to convey a change of status, to add more information, or if you find a typo. 

1. Log in to Zendesk. 
2. On the left, select Manage articles. 
3. Locate the alert message article that needs updating. You can do this by entering the alert label in the search field, and by filtering on Label: 
       alert-en-US is the label for English alerts
       alert-es-419 is the label for Spanish alerts
4. Make the needed updates. For information on formatting, see Style guidelines for help articles in Guide.
5. Verify and test the alert banner changes by selecting Preview and viewing the help center home page.
   Note that testing the documentation is required.
6. Select Save to save your changes. This will set the article workflow at Work in Progress; the changes to the alert are not yet visible.
7. Select the dropdown arrow next to Save and select Publish to publish your changes.
   The alert banner is now live on the help center's home page.

Remove a notification banner

Alerts by nature may only be live on the help center for a short period of time. You can quickly remove an alert by removing the label and unpublishing the article.

1. Log in to Zendesk. 
2. On the left, select Manage articles. 
3. Locate the alert message article that needs to be removed. You can do this by entering the alert label in the search field, and by filtering on Label: 
       alert-en-US is the label for English alerts
       alert-es-419 is the label for Spanish alerts
4. In the right hand column, in Labels, remove the alert label. 
5. Under Save, select Unpublish. This changes the article to a Work in Progress state, removes the banner from the home page, and removes the article from the help center.
   Note: if you select Save to save your changes, the article workflow state will be Work in Progress, but the article is still live on the help center.
6. Launch the help center to verify that the banner, and article, have been removed.

Additional Information

• About Workflow States in Team Publishing
• About Labels