Announcement banners

You can add an announcement banner that draws extra attention from your reader. It will be displayed at the top of the screen but will disappear once they start scrolling.

To add an announcement banner, use the html_theme_options["announcement"] configuration. There are two ways to use this.

Provide local HTML in your theme

By default, the value of your html_theme_options["announcement"] will be inserted directly into your announcement banner as raw HTML.

For example, the following configuration adds a simple announcement.

conf.py

html_theme_options = {
   ...
   "announcement": "Here's a <a href='https://pydata.org'>PyData Announcement!</a>",
}

Insert remote HTML with JavaScript

You can specify an arbitrary URL that will be used as the HTML source for your announcement. When the page is loaded, JavaScript will attempt to fetch this HTML and insert it as-is into the announcement banner. This allows you to define a single HTML announcement that you can pull into multiple documentation sites or versions.

If the value of html_theme_options["announcement"] begins with http it will be treated as a URL to remote HTML.

For example, the following configuration tells the theme to load the custom-template.html example from this documentation’s GitHub repository:

conf.py

html_theme_options = {
   ...
   "announcement": "https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/raw/main/docs/_templates/custom-template.html",
}

Update or remove announcement banner

If you set html_theme_options["announcement"] to plain text or HTML, then to update the announcement banner you need to modify this string and rebuild your documentation pages. To remove the announcement banner, set this value to an empty string and rebuild your documentation pages.

If you set html_theme_options["announcement"] to a URL string (starts with http), then you can edit the file at that URL to update the announcement banner. Saving an empty file at that URL will remove the announcement banner. That’s the main advantage of using a URL–you can change the announcement banner without rebuilding and redeploying all of your documentation pages. For example, if you point the announcement to the URL of a file in your repo, as we do on this documentation site (see previous section), then you can edit, save and push your changes to just that file (empty file = remove announcement) without rebuilding and redeploying all your docs.

Version warning banners

In addition to the general-purpose announcement banner, the theme includes a built-in banner to warn users when they are viewing versions of your docs other than the latest stable version. To use this feature, add the following to your conf.py:

conf.py

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "show_version_warning_banner": True,
}

Important

This functionality relies on the version switcher to determine the version number of the latest stable release. It will only work if your version switcher .json has exactly one entry with property "preferred": true and your entries have version properties that are parsable by the compare-versions node module, for example:

{
    "name": "stable",
    "version": "9.9.9",
    "url": "https://anything",
    "preferred": true
}

If the active version compares less than the preferred version, the announcement will inform the user that they are viewing an older version of the documentation and provide a link to the preferred version. If the version compares greater than the preferred version (or if the version match contains the strings “dev”, “rc” or “pre”), the announcement will say they are viewing an unstable development version instead.

If you want similar functionality for older versions of your docs (i.e. those built before the show_version_warning_banner configuration option was available), you can manually add a banner by prepending the following HTML to all pages (be sure to replace URL_OF_STABLE_VERSION_OF_PROJECT with a valid URL, and adjust styling as desired):

<div style="background-color: rgb(248, 215, 218); color: rgb(114, 28, 36); text-align: center;">
  <div>
    <div>This is documentation for <strong>an old version</strong>.
      <a href="{{ URL_OF_STABLE_VERSION_OF_PROJECT }}" style="background-color: rgb(220, 53, 69); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 1rem; padding: 0.375rem 0.75rem; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; text-align: center;">Switch to stable version</a>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>