Desk9 Notice Planner – Announcement Bar & Scheduler

Description

Desk9 Notice Planner is a lightweight plugin for informative site notices: vacation and holiday closures, changed opening hours, maintenance windows, delivery delays and short announcements. Create a notice once, schedule it precisely and let it appear and disappear automatically – evaluated in your site’s timezone on every page view.

It is deliberately not an aggressive marketing popup tool. The focus is on serious, accessible communication with your visitors.

Two display layouts

• Announcement Bar – a slim bar at the top or bottom of your site. Static, sticky or fixed, optionally pushing your content down instead of covering it. Choose whether it runs edge to edge with square corners, or floats as an inset message with a gap on all sides and rounded corners – the two never mix. Sets with hard edges can be softened per notice: keep their shadows and accent lines, swap everything for one thin outline, or go completely flat.
• Fullscreen Notice – an accessible dialog for critical information, with focus management, scroll lock and keyboard support.

Scheduling that understands your year

• Always active, exact date ranges (start/end with time), or yearly recurring periods.
• Yearly periods may cross the year boundary – “December 24 until January 2” simply works, every year, including leap years.
• All times use the timezone from Settings → General. Visibility is computed on each page view, not via cron, so notices appear exactly on time.
• A year calendar in the admin area shows all planned notices at a glance, including conflicts.

Fast to use

• 27 ready-made templates – summer vacation, public holiday, maintenance window, shipping delay, new address, privacy policy update, product safety notice and more. Pick a situation and the notice is prefilled.
• Quick Notice: publish a simple notice in seconds; refine it later in the full editor.
• The editor shows what you build. Controls sit on the left, the rendered notice stays visible on the right while you change anything – with desktop, tablet and mobile widths and a light or dark sample page.
• Ten style sets × five tones. Pick a look – from a bold solid bar to a soft tinted hairline, an elevated card, a dark surface or a neutral surface with a coloured accent rail – then pick how urgent it is: neutral, info, warning, important or success. Spacing, corners, borders and type come with the set.
• Every one of the 50 combinations was checked against WCAG 2.2 AA contrast. Individual colours and spacing can still be overridden per notice.
• Your theme’s font is used – no webfonts are loaded.

Thoughtful behavior

• Visitors can dismiss a notice for the session, until the notice ends, or for a custom number of days – stored only in their browser, without cookies.
• The close button can sit in the top right corner or vertically centred on the right edge, in three sizes, as a plain icon or in a circle.
• When you edit a notice, previously dismissed notices reappear automatically (content versioning).
• Show it again on demand. A “Show again” action in the notice list and in the editor voids every stored dismissal, so people who closed the notice see it once more. To check it yourself without affecting anyone, append ?d9notice_show=1 to any URL while logged in.
• Priorities (0–100) and a global mode decide what happens when several notices overlap: show only the highest one or stack up to three bars. Conflicts are flagged in the list, the editor and the calendar.
• Display rules: entire site, homepage only, selected content, or everything except selected content – plus context limits (front page, blog page, singular, archives, search, 404) and device visibility.

Multilingual

• WPML and Polylang compatible (wpml-config.xml included). Untranslated notices are hidden or fall back to the default language – your choice.

Built properly

• No external requests, no telemetry, no tracking, no cookies, no bundled frameworks, no jQuery on the frontend.
• Frontend CSS/JS load only when a notice is actually displayed.
• WCAG 2.2 AA oriented markup: named regions, real dialog semantics, focus trap, visible focus, reduced-motion support.
• Custom capabilities plus a ready-made Notice Manager role, nonce-protected actions, strict input validation, escaped output.

Privacy

Desk9 Notice Planner does not collect, store or transmit any personal data. It makes no external requests, loads no external resources and sets no cookies. The optional dismiss feature stores the dismissal state exclusively in the visitor’s own browser (sessionStorage/localStorage, keys prefixed with d9notice:notice:); these entries expire automatically and can be removed by clearing the browser storage.