Announcements
Markdown posts families read in the app: drafts, publishing, dashboard pinning — and what publishing does not send.
An announcement is a short post families read inside the app. Grading dates, holiday closures, a change of uniform supplier, a reminder about parking — the things you would otherwise write on the whiteboard and hope people saw.
Engage then Announcements is the screen. Owner and Admin only — instructors do not see it.
Writing one
New Announcement opens a two-field form.
Title
Up to 200 characters. This is what shows in the list, on the dashboard card and at the top of the family's page, so make it readable on its own: "Studio closed Monday 25 May" beats "Important notice".
Content
Markdown, up to 10,000 characters, with a live preview in the panel beside the editor. What you see in the preview is exactly what a family sees — same renderer.
Status
Draft or Published. Draft is the default, and a draft is invisible to families.
Show on dashboard
Off by default. See Pinning to the dashboard.
Then Create Announcement. You land back on the list.
What the Markdown supports
Headings, bold, italic, lists, links, block quotes, inline code and code blocks. Announcement text is sanitised before it renders — it is written by people, not by the app — so raw HTML is stripped, and tables do not render. A pipe-and-dash table will show up as literal pipes and dashes.
There is no image upload. A standard Markdown image pointing at a URL you host somewhere else will render; there is nowhere in this screen to put a file.
Draft or published
Every announcement is one or the other, and the badge in the Status column is a button — click it to flip between them without opening the editor.
| Status | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| Draft | Staff, on this screen only. |
| Published | Every family at the studio, on their Announcements page. |
Publishing is not a one-way door. Flipping a published post back to Draft pulls it out of the family view immediately.
Publishing re-stamps the date, every time
The Published date is set to now each time an announcement is saved with the status Published — including when you re-publish something that was already live, and including when you edit a live post and save it.
Both the family list and the dashboard sort newest-first on that date, so correcting a typo in last month's post pushes it back to the top of everyone's list. If the edit is cosmetic and the post is old, that is usually not what you want.
Pinning to the dashboard
The Dashboard column shows Shown or Hidden, and it is also a button.
An announcement appears on the dashboard only when both are true: its status is Published, and Show on dashboard is on. Turning the dashboard flag on for a draft does nothing until you publish it.
What "on the dashboard" means in practice:
- The five most recent qualifying announcements appear as cards, newest first, under an Announcements heading on the dashboard.
- Each card shows the title, the published date, and roughly the first 150 characters with the Markdown stripped out — so the first sentence is doing all the work.
- Families and staff see the same set. Read more takes a family to the full post and takes staff to the editor.
Pinning is how you make something unmissable. Pin sparingly: with everything pinned, nothing is.
Editing and deleting
Edit on a row reopens the same form. Delete asks for confirmation and then removes the post permanently — there is no archive and no undo. If you want it out of sight but retrievable, flip it to Draft instead.
The search box at the top filters by title only, in the browser.
What families see
Published announcements appear at their Announcements page, newest first, rendered in full — not truncated. Pinned ones also appear on their dashboard.
Nobody is emailed or notified
Publishing an announcement sends nothing. No email, no text message, no push notification, no badge. A family sees it the next time they open the app.
For anything time-critical — a same-day closure, a cancelled class — post the announcement and contact people the way you normally would. Treat this screen as a noticeboard, not as a broadcast channel.
A reasonable rhythm
- Pin the one or two things that matter this month, published.
- Leave everything else published but unpinned; it still shows on the announcements page.
- Unpin when it stops being current, rather than deleting.
- Keep drafts for things you are preparing — a grading notice you want ready before the date is fixed.
Last reviewed