Once your settings have been adjusted to your liking, you can start creating announcements to display on your timeline. You can do so from the WordPress administrative dashboard. In the left hand menu hover over ‘Timeline Express‘ and select ‘New Announcement‘.
The ‘New Announcement’ page has three main sections that you’ll need to edit when creating a new announcement. The full page will look similar to the following:
Announcement Info.
1) Announcement Title
The first step in creating a new announcement is to enter a title for your announcement. This is the main title for your announcement, and if using pretty permalinks – will also dictate the URL. You’ll want to enter your title as you would any post or page.
2) Announcement Color
You can set the announcement color using the provided color picker. Alternatively, if you have a specific hex value you would like to use you can easily enter that value into the input field. The announcement color is the color of the icon container on the timeline on the front end of your site.
Example:
3) Announcement Icon
Next, you can select an icon to assign to your announcement. Depending on what you picked for the ‘Default Announcement Icon‘ on the settings page, this value may be different for you. Click the arrow to expose the icon dropdown, which contains over 300 icons from the Font Awesome icon pack. You can scroll down to reveal additional icons.
timeline_express_font_awesome_version.4) Announcement Date
Next, you’ll set the date of this announcement. This is the time in history that this announcement occurred. This date will be used to sort your announcements in chronological order. By default, the current date is populated in the announcement date field. When you click inside of the announcement date field, you’ll see a small calendar popup allowing you to select any time in history. Alternatively, you can type a date into the input field to avoid having to scroll back or forward in time.
5) Announcement Banner
The last step in the announcement info section is the announcement banner. The announcement banner can be locally hosted images or videos or even videos hosted on external sites such as Vimeo and YouTube. This is the image/video that will be displayed on your timeline. This image/video is also used on the single announcement template page. Click on the ‘Add Media’ button to the right of the input field to assign an image or video to this announcement, similar to assigning a featured image to a standard WordPress post. Alternatively, you can paste a URL to an externally hosted video on Vimeo and YouTube.
350px x 150px. If this image is to small and you want the image to display larger on the front end of your site, please take a look at our code snippet for Altering the Default Timeline Image Size.6) Associated Timeline (pro version)
Pro version users have the option to assign the announcement to a specific timeline. This is useful when you want to limit your announcements to certain timelines, or you want to give your users the ability to sort between different timelines. If you haven’t created any additional timelines yet, you can head into ‘Timeline Exppress > Timelines‘ to create new ones.
7) Announcement Banner Popup (pro version)
Checking the ‘Announcement Banner Popup’ checkbox will allow users to view your announcement banner images and videos in a slick modal pop-up. This prevents users from having to view the single announcement template when they want to view the media attached to the announcement.
8) Announcement Categories (pro version)
In the right-hand side, just below the publish section you can create and/or assign categories to your announcements. This is a great way to allow your users to view and sort announcements on the front end of your site without having to scroll through a long, and seemingly endless, timeline. You can create new categories right from the edit/create announcement page, so you don’t have to leave the page if you need new categories.
Announcement Styles (pro version)
In Timeline Express Pro v2 users now have the ability to fully customize the apperance and animation styles for each announcement container on the timeline. Using input fields on the announcement edit screen, users can set the icon animations, container animations, border color and size, shadow color and size and many many more things.
The ability to customize the announcement animations and styles was one of the most requested features, and we’re now pleased to offer it as a peice of functionality in Timeline Express Pro.
Announcement Content
The main content of your announcement can be entered in the WYSIWYG editor, just below the ‘Announcement Info.’ section. This is a standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor, so feel free to style your text however you’d like, insert images or drop a shortcode into the content of your announcements.
Publish Your Announcement
Finally, after you’ve filled in all of the fields above you’ll want to publish your announcement. This is done the same way you publish a post or page within WordPress. In the top right-hand side of your page, you’ll see a container titled ‘Publish’.
If you want your announcement to appear on your timeline immediately, you can simply click publish. However, if you want the announcement to appear on the timeline at a later date – you can click on ‘Edit’ next to ‘Publish: Immedately’. You can set the date to any point in time, and once that date and time come, your announcement will go live on your timeline.
Are there a maximum amount of announcements that can be made? I hit 365 recently and I am now having issues posting new announcements.
Hi Ahsley,
There is no limit to the number of announcements that can be displayed. They are similar to the posts or pages, which also have no limit. When you say you are having issues posting new announcements, what exactly is going wrong?
Thanks,
Evan
Hi Ashley,
There are currently no limits to the number of items that can be displayed on the timeline.
Hello,
Firstly, thanks for making such a cool plugin!!
So I’ve created three announcements with dates. Now what do I do? Where do I go to see this time line? I assumed that I would need to copy&paste a shortcode onto a page to see the announcements in a “timeline fashion” but couldn’t find any shortcodes. I also checked to see if maybe I could add a widget but it doesn’t exist. I would appreciate any help!!
Thanks,
Matt
Hi Matt,
After you’ve gone ahead and created your announcements, you just need to place the shortcode (`[timeline-express]`) onto a page, or into a post. We have some documentation setup explaining the ways to display the timeline, take a look here: https://www.wp-timelineexpress.com/documentation/display-the-timeline/
Evan
Hello, is there way i dont have to have ‘read more’ under my image and the text information is just there. I dont want to click over to a new page to view my information
Hi Madalyn,
You can toggle off the ‘Read More’ ability on the settings page, from within the dashboard. If you go to ‘Timeline Express > Settings’ you can disable the read more setting.
Best,
Evan
Hi there. I have the free version of this plugin, but links and shortcodes aren’t working at all. Is this a feature of Timeline Express Pro only?
Hey Brad,
Shortcodes don’t work in the announcement due to the way that WordPress generates post excerpts. This is actually a feature and not a bug within WordPress core itself.
To work around this limitation we created an HTML Excerpts add-on, which can be installed and run alongside the base plugin – to enable HTML markup, shortcodes etc. You can download it here on the site, from the dashboard within the plugin (Timeline Express > Add-Ons) or you can download it from WordPress.org.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/timeline-express-html-excerpt-add-on/
Let us know if you have any other questions.
Best,
Evan
That worked perfectly – thanks so much for the workaround. This product is awesome!!!
Hi. It seems that there is a 26 word limitation for the announcements. Is that so? What can I do to make the whole text visible?
Hi Marianne,
There should be no limit on the length of announcements. You can tweak the announcement excerpt length on the settings page under ‘Timeline Express > Settings’, which will alter the length of all announcement excerpts.
Evan
Hello
I was checking this cool timeline and downloaded the plug in on my site. I was attempting to build something similar to this timeline.
https://www.wp-timelineexpress.com/examples/basic-timeline/
I am missing someone in documentation. Sorry but I am seeing “Creating an Announcement” – is an “Announcement” an entry for the timeline? But because this is not what I am getting. Thanks for your time.
Hello, I’m having an issue whereby everthing looks fine in the announcement builder and on the timeline, but when I click the ‘Read more’ button, none of the pages will load. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Nicole,
If you’d like to send an email over to our support team, we’d be happy to help out. Feel free to use the contact form here on our site to reach out. We’d be happy to take a look.
Evan
I downloaded the plugin and am creating announcements but the text wrapping and margins seem to be way off. The text is centered on the page and there is 200px of space between the title, banner photo, and description.
Hi Amy, what is the shortcode that you have? Did you copy the shortcode from our site here? You’ll want to make sure that the shortcode is not wrapped in any other HTML. If you copy it directly from our site here and paste it into yours, it usually contains a “code” tag around the shortcode (which you don’t want). Do you have a link to that page so we can take a look? I know that we’ve also seen this occur when a page builder (Beaver Builder, Visual Composer etc.) is being used to add the shortcode to the page. The page builders tend to wrap the HTML generated by the shortcode in “p” tags, causing a lot of weird margin and spacing issues.
Hello,
I have a problem with Time Express.
When i try to add new announcement, the standard layout does not appear, but instead only “Add Title” on the whole screen (without further structure where do add the data etc.)
Your help is highly appreciated. I could send screen shot of what i see.
Hi John,
This is most likely due to WordPress 5.0 being rolled out with the new block editor. We pushed out an update this morning to the free and the pro versions that disable the block editor on the announcement pages. Feel free to update to one of those new releases and the issue should resolve itself.
Let me know if it doesn’t or reach out to us via the contact form and I’d be happy to investigate for you.
Evan
Hi there!
When I publish an announcement, will it be immediately visible on my blog? Or just when I make a call on the timeline?
Thanks!
The announcements should be immediately visible on your site unless you have some sort of caching in place such as the W3 total cache plugin for example
I see the “Read More Visibility” setting in the Settings area. It is a global setting, affecting all announcements, right? Our need is to show it on some and hide it on others. It’s really critical to usability, in my opinion. For most of our announcements, it’s a bother to the user. They click and see nothing more than what the announcement shows. But with other posts, we want to show much more detail. The user can’t know whether or not the post has meaningful detail without clicking the Read More link.
Hi Gary,
This feature is available in our Pro version. Each announcement has the ability to turn on/off the read more links, but it’s not a feature we have included in the free version. If it’s mission critical I would suggest upgrading to the Pro version to enable that feature.