Setting start/end times in Hijack

The next options in the ‘Experience Setup’ panel allow you to configure the time window in which you’d like your Hijack to run. You’ll see the time specified in dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm am/pm format in both the ‘Start’ and ‘End/Expiration Date’ fields. Clicking in either of these fields will bring up a useful calendar view which makes it easy to select a beginning and end time/date for your event. While most users will want to run events that last an hour or a few hours on a single day, it is perfectly possible to have a Hijack active for several days or even weeks. It’s up to you!

Listing and adding Hijacks

Once logged in to the backend of your Hijack site, you can access a list view of all of your Hijacks within the ‘Hijacks’ menu item in the left-hand sidebar of the WordPress admin panel. You can add a new Hijack either from within this section or by hovering over the menu item and selecting ‘New Hijack’.

The ‘Add New Hijack’ screen contains an empty field in which you can name the Hijack and a tabbed form interface below, titled ‘Experience Details’. This is what you’ll use to configure its content and settings.

Adding Chapters

Navigate to the ‘Chapters’ tab of your Hijack’s ‘Experience Details’ panel. The first field you’ll see allows you to add a ‘Chapter Introduction’ to your Chapter contents list on the front end. You can find out more details about this here.

Further down, you’ll see a search table headed with the title ‘Select Chapters’. Here you can scroll through the list of Chapters you have already created and select the relevant items for inclusion in your Hijack. Alternatively, you can begin typing in the search field in order to narrow the list of items.

Once you have found the right Chapters, add them to your Hijack by clicking on them. Selected chapters will then appear in the right-hand column. You can remove chapters from this column by hovering and selecting the minus (-) button. Once you are happy with your Chapter list, go ahead and publish or save your Hijack.

Adding an intro video

You can add an Intro for your users to view when they first open your Hijack and before they begin diving into Chapters. Simply toggle the ‘Experience has Intro’ switch to ‘Yes’ which will add a new tab in the sidebar. Click on this tab to configure your intro video.

You can choose to have the Hijack skip to the first chapter once the intro is complete. You can also choose whether the intro video can be viewed again after the user has moved on to the main content of your Hijack or whether to disable this.

The settings for adding a video itself are identical to those found in Chapters. Please read this article for a more in-depth look at adding video.

Adding active URLs

The final part of the ‘Experience Setup’ section is where you’ll specify the URLs on which the Hijack will sit for the duration of its runtime. Remember, this will need to be URLs owned by your institution. Use the blue ‘Add Row’ button to add more URLs. Hover over the far right column of the table in order to bring up the option to ‘Remove row’. You can specify as few or as many URLs as you like.

For example, you might be running a niche Q&A for current English students which you need to be active on the English department landing page only. Conversely, you could be running an Open Day for postgraduate students which you might find useful to appear on the Postgraduate minisite as well as the home page in order to achieve a wider reach.

Adjusting the margin bottom

On the front end of an Active URL, Hijacks’s pop-up icon appears 180px from the bottom of the browser by default. However, you have the power to customise this. Type in a new value into the ‘Margin Bottom’ field if you’d prefer the icon to appear higher or lower. A common reason for this would be to avoid accidentally blocking important content.

Adding a guest list

If you have the Data Capture extension, you can also make events private, by adding a guest list. A guest list will only allow a pre-approved list of people to attend the Hijack.

1. In the Hijack edit screen, first turn on called “Experience Requires Consent”, and then navigate to the Consent tab.
2. You should then choose a consent form that you would like to use and enable the option called “Experience Is Private” and upload a CSV file to the “CSV of Allowed Users” option. If you have not created a form yet you should do this now, but take note of point 4.
3. IMPORTANT: Your CSV file must have a column with the explicit header of “uniqueId”. This is the field that will be checked for.
4. Over in the form builder of your chosen form, make sure you check the option called “Field is Unique Identifier” in the field that you want to check against the “uniqueID” field.

Adding a Chapter introduction

Once fully configured, your Hijack will be built from several separate Chapters. If you’d like to write an introduction to sit above the list of Chapters on the Hijack’s front end, you can do that here in the ‘Chapters’ tab of the initial Hijack ‘Experience Setup’ table.