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    • Mail Notification for Blogs?

    Posted by bsamson posts: 4

    I'm trying to understand the usage of Watches and whether it will fit my particular needs. Let me explain, and provide the options I've been able to come up with to resolve my dilemma:

    Planned Usage: I'd like to be able to use Tikiwiki as a collaborative communication tool for managing multiple software projects within a program. Among the TW features, I plan to significantly use:

    • Wiki - document application functionality and current project requirements
    • Blog - provide a journal of ongoing project activities that may affect members of the team


    Need: Because I can't rely on all team members to monitor the site daily, I need to push content out via email. From what I can determine, I can use the Mail Notifications capability to send an email to each user when any wiki page changes. I haven't tested that capability yet, but presume that it works fine.

    Problem:
    I can't figure out how to push emails out for new blog entries.

    Options:

    1. Use articles instead of a Blog, since I see that "A user submits an article" is an option in the Mail Notifications admin section. However, the chonological aspects of a blog would be lost, and it doesn't seem to be an effective use of Articles.
    2. Find some freeware RSS->email program that can run on my machine to regularly monitor the RSS feed and send emails when something changes. Nice idea, but I haven't been able to find an application that I could install to give me this functionality. (Remember, intranet only app - no internet ASP options available)
    3. Modify TW to provide a monitor function to the Blog functionality. (Or, figure out how to use it if it's already available.)
    4. Add a mail notification event for when any Blog post is added/modified. I think this is the right thing, but to this point I haven't been able to figure out how to add any new items into this dropdown.


    Side Problem:
    How can I set up the system to provide users these mail notifications by default, rather than individually assigning them within the admin screens? Defining a single email pointing to a distribution list would be a solution, but I don't have the rights to our Exchange server to create such a distribution list. Ideas?

    Thanks in advance!

    Regards,
    Brian
    Cincinnati, Ohio


    Environment: Intranet only, WinXP Pro, Apache 2.0.48(Win32), PHP 4.3.5RC2, MySQL 4.0.17-nt

    Reads: 1647
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    Posted by Damian Parker posts: 2881 United Kingdom

    Hi!

    Firstly, take a look at my site http://www.damosoft.co.uk well actually now I've said that, you wont be able to see the sections I want to show without a client status login. Anyway, I use TikiWiki to manage all my development work, which also includes the use of w.Bloggar and tiki's Blogs! You have got my attension on this post for the simple reason I've never ever thought before about having a blog post send out a mail notification. Take a peek at BlogDev, I've adopted the blog development work for Tiki because its not really upto the usual blogging standard. I could certainly add a new mail event for you quite easily and supply you with a patch or the patched files.

    With the side problem, i'm unsure :/ Unless it was linked into the tiki newsletters feature of course!

    Damian

    Link
    Posted by bsamson posts: 4

    Damien/Chealer9,

    I would definitely appreciate any assistance you could provide in creating a mail event patch to allow blog monitoring via email. There are a few other items I'm struggling to define (e.g. multi-layer user security, appropriate use of categories, topics and structures), but I'll try to work on one problem at a time.

    Unfortunately I'm a bit of a neophyte in PHP development, and have just introduced myself to the TikiWiki platform late last week. I'm one of those tech-God has-beens who have turned to project management and are gradually seeing their technical skills degrade. (Except for SQL .. it's like riding a bike!) Please bear with me on the inevitable confusion regarding some things you may take as obvious.

    At any rate...

    After evaluating PHPNuke, PostNuke, SnipSnap, and a variety of other products, TW looks to me to have the most promise in developing a intranet-based software project communication portal. I look forward to modifying it as necessary to accomodate a "typical" project manager's needs, and will keep a log of what I'm doing so that it may be reproduced by others.

    Regards,

    Brian

    Link
    Posted by Damian Parker posts: 2881 United Kingdom

    >
    > Regards,
    >
    > Brian
    >

    I'm sure we can make you feel at home :-) I'll get some time later in the week to look at this notification patch, in the meantime give me a shout if you need anything else!

    Damian

    Link

    Posted by Philippe Cloutier posts: 1001 Canada

    Check this blog
    It has the monitoring option. You must remove the default blog heading completely to get it at the moment. I just commited a fix for that which should be in 1.8.1.

    About the automation, somewhere in tiki-register.php you must enter something like that.

    $hash = md5'.';
    $email = $userlib->get_user_email($user);
    $this->query($query,array($user,$event,$object));
    $query = "insert into `tiki_user_watches`(`user`,`event`,`object`,`email`,`hash`,`type`,`title`,`url`) ";
    $query.= "values(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)";
    $this->query($query,array($user,"blog_post",blognumber,$email,$hash,"Blog post",$title,"tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=blognumber"));

    Change blognumber to what your blog gets. $title can be changed (will appear in user Watches page only I think).

    Link

    Posted by bsamson posts: 4

    Damien/Chealer9,

    I would definitely appreciate any assistance you could provide in creating a mail event patch to allow blog monitoring via email. There are a few other items I'm struggling to define (e.g. multi-layer user security, appropriate use of categories, topics and structures), but I'll try to work on one problem at a time.

    Unfortunately I'm a bit of a neophyte in PHP development, and have just introduced myself to the TikiWiki platform late last week. I'm one of those tech-God has-beens who have turned to project management and are gradually seeing their technical skills degrade. (Except for SQL .. it's like riding a bike!) Please bear with me on the inevitable confusion regarding some things you may take as obvious.

    At any rate...

    After evaluating PHPNuke, PostNuke, SnipSnap, and a variety of other products, TW looks to me to have the most promise in developing a intranet-based software project communication portal. I look forward to modifying it as necessary to accomodate a "typical" project manager's needs, and will keep a log of what I'm doing so that it may be reproduced by others.

    Regards,

    Brian

    Link
    Posted by Damian Parker posts: 2881 United Kingdom

    >
    > Regards,
    >
    > Brian
    >

    I'm sure we can make you feel at home :-) I'll get some time later in the week to look at this notification patch, in the meantime give me a shout if you need anything else!

    Damian

    Link

    Posted by Philippe Cloutier posts: 1001 Canada
    As I said, you must remove the default blog heading completely to get blog monitoring at the moment.
    Link
    Posted by bsamson posts: 4

    Chealer9,

    Ah. It took me a bit to figure out what you were asking me to actually do (code-wise). From the templates/tiki-view_blog.tpl template, I took out the first if statement and left the else section as a standalone. With that mod, the monitor function for blogs is now working great - Thanks!

    The next odd thing on the blog side is that only the first blog entry is showing from the tiki-view_blog.tpl template. At this point I only had a single blog entry set up for testing. When I added a second, the page shows that there are 2 posts, but I can only see 1 on the tiki_view_blog page. I assume it's related to the {section name=ix loop=$listpages} line in the tiki-view-blog template. When I performed a sprint $listpages in the debug window, the array only shows a single entry. The tiki_blog_posts table looks like the post is correctly saved as well. I haven't searched the site or buglist for this yet, so it may already be known, but it seems to be fairly constraining.

    Thank you!


    2/13 Edit
    Odd. I logged out of the system and logged back in, and now the blogs are displaying just fine. Strange... I guess I'll withdraw my issue with blog displays.

    Link

    Posted by bsamson posts: 4

    Chealer9,

    Ah. It took me a bit to figure out what you were asking me to actually do (code-wise). From the templates/tiki-view_blog.tpl template, I took out the first if statement and left the else section as a standalone. With that mod, the monitor function for blogs is now working great - Thanks!

    The next odd thing on the blog side is that only the first blog entry is showing from the tiki-view_blog.tpl template. At this point I only had a single blog entry set up for testing. When I added a second, the page shows that there are 2 posts, but I can only see 1 on the tiki_view_blog page. I assume it's related to the {section name=ix loop=$listpages} line in the tiki-view-blog template. When I performed a sprint $listpages in the debug window, the array only shows a single entry. The tiki_blog_posts table looks like the post is correctly saved as well. I haven't searched the site or buglist for this yet, so it may already be known, but it seems to be fairly constraining.

    Thank you!


    2/13 Edit
    Odd. I logged out of the system and logged back in, and now the blogs are displaying just fine. Strange... I guess I'll withdraw my issue with blog displays.

    Link

    Posted by Philippe Cloutier posts: 1001 Canada

    Hi bsamson, that's not what I was asking you to do, but at least it works now :-)
    About the bug, i edon't think I remember reading this, feel free to investigate more.

    Link