Scheduling site-wide alerts

Site-wide alerts surface on the notification bell in the page header. Use them for things like product launches, Devtoberfest kickoff, scheduled outages, or "please rebuild your tutorial cache" notes for authors.

Where to author

/admin-ui/#alerts (Admin role required).

Fields

• Title — short headline (≤200 chars).
• Body — optional one-paragraph context (≤2000 chars; plain text only).
• Severity — Information / Success / Warning / Error. Drives the bell badge color.
• Audience — ALL (everyone), AUTHENTICATED (logged-in only), ADMIN (admins only).
• Start (UTC) / End (UTC) — visibility window. Leave End blank for ad-hoc ("on until I turn it off") alerts.
• CTA label / URL — optional. URL suggestions are scoped to in-app routes; free text is accepted for external URLs.
• Dismissible — when on, visitors can close the notification (stored per-device).
• On — kill switch. Set to off to instantly hide without editing the schedule.

Timing

• Alerts are runtime-served and do not trigger a Hugo rebuild.
• Visitors see your change within ~60 seconds of save (server cache TTL).
• For instant testing, hit /api/alerts (or /api/alerts/me while logged in) with curl after saving.

Dismissals

• Per-device only — dismissed in browser A means the visitor still sees it in browser B.
• Dismissals are NOT garbage-collected; if you re-purpose an alert title, give it a new row (and let the old one expire) rather than editing in place.