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July 6, 2006
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ProWikiCenter
Feature Requests /
Email Notification

 

Flexible ProWiki-ish Email Notifications

The Top:EmailNotification page mentions that this feature is a work in progress, but I am not sure how I can check it out. To mention my two yen, I have a few suggestions about notifications, which might be useful to the developers in finalizing this feature for the release version of ProWiki.

  • A useful feature might be to be able to "subscribe" to any page in the Wiki, and also just as easily unsubscribe thereof. I can imagine that this could be a Subscribe / Unsubscribe toggle text link which can be accessed from any page.
  • It would be useful to have a way to create a template or templates for the body of the email to be sent, which might have some variables you can set, within the wiki itself somehow. It seems ProWiki-ish to me, to have it neatly self-contained within the system, much like the excellent Context pages. Perhaps exactly which email template is used, would be settable in the Wiki or Sub-Wiki's context page.
  • I know that email subject lines cause problems sometimes, with programs that do not correctly process unicode or non-latin character sets in the subject. I have seen this in several cases where people have tried to localize systems for Japan but have run into trouble with email subjects, and have had work out code to correctly "pack" the characters there. Perhaps a first-pass effort would be to simply make the subject line as "ProWiki Notification" or something similarly generic, and then deal with processing it correctly so it could contain the name of the wiki page, for example, even when that page was rendered in unicode.
  • I have used RSS notification as an alternative, meaning if a wiki page, and therefore its (the site's) RSS feed is updated, my RSS reader might be able to be set to alert me.

Notification Reach Features

Of course, it would be totally cool if ProWiki could:

  • ...notify me with an HTML email of the page, complete with embedded images.
  • ...give me a color-coded diff of the textual page differences, also HTML, I assume.
At any rate, thanks for listening.

Cheers, RickCogley July 3, 2006 14:43 CET