Scenario
As an admin or content owner, you want to manage email or Slack notifications by enabling/disabling them or by changing the content of the default notification templates.
Solution
Update notifications on the System Settings level or override system settings for notifications on individual content items.
Viewing and managing notifications
To view and manage System Settings notification templates, go to Settings and select Notifications from applicable headings (Site, Security, Events, Mentorship & Office Hours, and Content). These settings apply to all notifications for your instance of PlusPlus.
Follow these steps to view and manage notifications for individual content items. These settings replace system defaults and apply only to the content items you customize notifications for.
Go to the content item whose notifications you want to manage.
Open the context menu (button with three dots) and select Edit.
Go to Notifications and update them as needed.
Updating notifications - General
You can make the following adjustments to a notification, either in System Settings or in for individual content items.
Click the Enabled toggle to turn on/turn off the notification. You can also turn on/turn the email or Slack notification individually.
Changing the Enabled option for the notification as a whole does not automatically change the email and Slack toggles to match. The system only honors the email and Slack toggles when the general Enabled toggle for the notification is turned on.
Change the Subject and Message using available tags and/or with Django and Markdown formats. See the Go deeper section for more.
You can click Preview to view your Subject or Message as recipients will see it (without code for tags, and so on). Note that the preview uses demonstration data for tags, not data for the event or content item the notification is for.
Turn on Copy recipient's manager to Cc managers on the notifications. Note that this is only available for some notifications. For some notifications directed at managers, you can Copy recipient's assistant to Cc executive assistants.
Turn on Copy facilitators to Cc facilitators for the content item on the notification. This is useful for compliance and engagement tracking. Note: This option is only available for some notifications and currently does not include presenters to be cc recipients, only organizers, at this time.
The gear-checkmark icon indicates the use of the default. This changes to an red Undo button when you edit a setting, which you can click to return it to the default.
Please note that all PlusPlus notifications do count weekends as well as weekdays so a 14 day timer set on a notification or due date will factor in every Saturday and Sunday in those 14 days.
For more on how notifications cascade from system settings or parent content, see How cascaded settings work.
Go deeper
Editing notification subjects and messages
Notification templates in PlusPlus are well suited to the need for each notification, including necessary tags and conditions. You can make simple changes to wording and keep the current tags and conditions in place, you can add your own tags, or you can make more advanced changes using Django or Markdown.
For adding tags, you can click Need help with tags? to view a full list of tags you can use for the notification. Note that there are different tags available for each notification.
Take a look at Pro tips for customizing notifications for more.
Slack notification nuances
The text of notifications templates generally support markdown as we demonstrate in our documentation and in our notification defaults with examples in our notification pro tips article. Markdown is a common plain text formatting language to produce HTML. In particular we suggest using Markdown to make links. In markdown that means putting a description in square braces and the url to follow in parentheses:
[Google's HomePage](https://google.com)
This will be rendered to HTML like this:
Slack, however, does NOT support HTML and so DM notifications do not support Markdown. Slack also does not support bulleted lists via the API. To put links in your Slack DM notifications you can use Slack’s text formatting language mrkdwn which would look like this instead:
<https://google.com|Google's HomePage>
Notice that the link and the description are both inside angle brackets and the optional description is separated from the URL with a pipe. Other basic formatting is exactly the same.
For more specific Slack formatting details please see Slack's basic formatting documentation which is the reference for formatting Slack messages sent via API.
Cascading notifications and event notifications
When you update notifications at the System Settings level, your changes cascade down to already-existing content items (as well as any new content created after your update). Live events have another layer of cascaded settings, as changes made to event type notifications can cascade to already-scheduled events of that type. This creates cascaded settings on three levels: System Settings > Event Type > Events. See How to manage event notifications for more.