Email Notifications

Purpose

To notify users of changes made to MindTouch pages and file attachments.

Intended Audience

Who will this be useful for? Also, is this a commercial feature? Into which bucket does it fall?

Additional information

• Options: Immediate, daily or weekly digest emails
• User prefs page needed
• Width of email: no larger than 600px

References

Any bugs, forums, other pages

Being supposed to be sent by the external SMTP authentication if is set, the Exim-sending notification emails are blocked by the spam filter.

My Prefs

• Subscribe to:
  
  • immediate changes
  • daily digest
  • weekly digest
• Notify me when:
  • content is added
  • content is removed
  • a new page is added
  • a page is deleted or moved
  • minor edits (need to define)
  • talk page is changed
  • a comment is added
  • a page becomes restricted or access changes
  • files, tags are added/updated
• opt out of notifications for formatting changes

 Immediate notification

• List of edited/new pages at top (if more than one); link to summary of changes below
• Light green highlighted text = added content; light red highlighted text + strikethrough = removed content
• Time, date, edited by [username] with link to their profile/user page
• Unsubscribe and Edit Notification Settings links at bottom
• Link to homepage of their MindTouch

 Daily Digest

• Date at top
• List of newly added users
• Stats?
• Divide into sections:
  • New Pages
  • Recent changes
  • Deleted pages

 Weekly Digest

• Show time span (ie. Week of May 10, 2009 to May 16, 2009)
• List of newly added users
• Stats?
• Divide into sections:
  • New Pages
  • Recent changes
  • Deleted pages

UI requirements

API requirements

• Make Page Alerts an extension?
  • Pro:
    • Easier to create different commercial & OSS versions
    • Easier custom configuration as well as enable/disable
  • Con:
    • In multi-tenant, this will result in a service per instance
• Backend
  • user preferences
    
    • Switch storage to  sqlite
    • Add fine grained user preference storage
    • modify accumulation queue to accumulate & persist per user by preferences
  • Email generation
    
    • Need templating engine
    • XSLT
      • Where to store template and how to expose it
      • Will XSLT be enough or do we need scripting?
    • XHTML+Dekiscript
      • Storage is just a page in Template namespace
      • What's needed to execute dekiscript from an extension without page context?
      • What dekiscript function specific to page alerts would we need?
• Features
  • User preferences
    • Dekiscript for generating form with Javascript for post back to API?
  • Should Page alerts should also generate the subscription drop down options
    
    • This would make customization easier and could be used to disable the Page Alerts UI (needed for moving to extension)
• Open Questions
  • Where do we get site stats from? Do they exist in deki yet, or is building a stats service a pre-req to adding stats to the emails
  • Will page deletion be changed so i can still query the deleted pages permissions (requirement for reporting them)