#8: Email notifications

In the first iteration, Ploneboard shouldn't attempt to invent an entire notification/subscription framework on its own.

PloneHelpCenter implements the notification in a simple way, having a simple property that turns on/off mail notification is more than good enough for 90% of the use cases. Individual settings on each thread is overkill.

We should of course have RSS integration too, shouldn't be hard at all with Plone 2.1.

I have already written RSS/atom/RDF/etc support using my fatsyndication product. See http://svn.plone.org/view/collective/PloneboardSyndication/ .

As for subscription services, I firmly believe that this should be abstracted out into a separate product that can be reused for subscriptions to arbitrary things. I sketched out some very basic interfaces at http://svn.plone.org/view/collective/basesubscription/ and I actually have a fair chunk of implementation in a 'fatsubscription' product sitting on my dev server.

That was all before I heard about PloneSubscription from Ingeniweb @ http://cvs.sourceforge.net/[…]/ . I only saw this two days ago, and haven't had a chance to figure out if it does exactly what I'm after - in a generic enough way.

Bottom line, neither of these two features should live in Ploneboard, IMHO.

I agree that PB should use tools that are already out there. The tools need to be integrated however, and not every time by every instance. Pick one that shows the most promise, and go with it as part of the product, and if someone wants to pick a different one they can. either way, the functionality has to be part of the product or it won't be adopted readily.

... then let's please try to do so in a reusable way - is all I'm saying. Subscription services are useful in numerous cases. Let's do it properly once and be done with, rather than have half-arsed implementations across numerous products, and others that would benefit from it having no implementation at all.

Integration is, of course, important too, but it does not preclude reuse.

I totally agree.

Is there any documentation on PloneboardSyndication that you could share?

PloneboardSyndication uses code from fatsyndication (and ultimately, interfaces and templates from basesyndication). If you want an idea of how it works, you should look at both of those products. Everything is in the collective @ http://svn.plone.org/view/collective/.

At the most basic level, though, once you've installed PloneboardSyndication correctly, your Ploneboard* objects will all have views available that produce syndication feeds of various flavours. Currently, that amounts to 'atom.xml', 'feed.rdf', 'feed11.rdf', and 'rss.xml'. No links to these views are (currently) placed in any of the Ploneboard templates, though, so you'll probably need to make arrangements for publicising them in your sites if you want to.

On our instance of Ploneboard, we used CMFNotification for email subscriptions. This is done at the conversation level, through we're investigating the forum level as well. This will suffice for us until Ploneboard works well with Plone 3.0 and any event notification that may be developed there.

Hi Marshall - I've installed CMFNotification along with Ploneboard, and I'm getting notifications of new conversations, but not getting notified when someone replies to an existing conversation. Do you have that working? I've tried setting a rule for item modification and tried subscribing to the board.

At Connexions, we are writing an email subscription tool, which is intended to be attached to a hacked up version of CMFBoard we have in beta.

It's fairly well along, and is intended for public release; see for current code http://rhaptos.org/[…]/

Quite possibly a good fit (and maybe I'll even use Ploneboard instead, if I have a chance.)

It occurred to me last weekend that the content rules system in Plone 3 could be extended with an 'action' that sends emails to a list of subscribers. Today I have a working proof-of-concept and expect to put out a beta by the end of the month. The system has a "Notify subscriber" action for the content rules system, and also a portlet that appears in areas of the site where a rule containing this type of action is assigned. THe portlet allows users to change their subscription status with one click (uses KSS).

There is a limitation in the rules system that causes some problems - for example, it doesn't appear possible to write one single rule that detects both new forum posts in unmoderated forums, and the publish transition in moderated forums :-( Since the subscriber list is stored in the action, this means you need two separate subscriber lists, one for moderated forums and the other for unmoderated forums. One solution would be to store the list in a separate utility and share the list between the two rules, but that is adding extra complexity - it would be better to tweak the rules system IMHO.

So is there a way forward on this these days ? it seems to pop up fairly often on the ploneboard forums.. however there doesn't seem to be an official solution. happy to start work on something of my own but don't want to if there is work done already !

we needed it so i've done it specifically for ploneboard.. there is some info about how to get it going on plone 3 here:

http://plone.org/[…]/#1202153645

not a complete implementation in terms of users in control etc but suits us and might be useful for someone.

I would love to see email notification added to Ploneboard. Would be a great way to replace listserv functionality similar to what is being done within the Edu1World system.