Notifications

Description

The system informs users about relevant changes in the system via a web message box, and via email.

Todo

Implementation is in progress.

Events

ploneintranet.notifications leverages the ZCA eventing system to keep track of relevant changes in the system, to inform users about those changes.

Because Plone Intranet provides a rich social user experience, there’s a lot of social activity going on that we should tell users about.

Microblog

  • A StatusUpdate I posted is liked
  • A StatusUpdate I posted is re-shared
  • A StatusUpdate I posted is commented upon
  • Somebody posts a comment on a StatusUpdate I commented upon before
  • Somebody @mentions me in a StatusUpdate post

User Profile

  • Somebody starts following me
  • Somebody endorses my profile with a skill

Content

  • Somebody submits a page for review in an area I’m reviewer for
  • A Page I created is liked
  • A Page I created is shared
  • A Page I created is commented upon
  • Somebody posts a comment on a Page I commented upon before

__future__

  • Somebody starts following a page I created
  • A Page I’m following is changed, liked, shared, or commented upon
  • Somebody submits a request to join a workspace I’m TeamManager for
  • etc, etc

System architecture

All of the event types described above will, or should, result in event notifications in the Zope3 sense of the word. Zope3 provides a synchronous eventing system that broadcasts events via notifiy().

ploneintranet.notifications registers subscribers for those events. Those event subscribers are registered as multiadapters that listen only for events that are broadcast regarding objects that are marked as ploneintranet.notifications.interfaces.INotifiable.

Implementation

Todo

Can somebody who wrote the implementation actually describe how it hangs together?

Steps to support a new event type

If you want to support notifications for a new event type, the steps are as follows:

  • define and emit the source event you’d like the notifications to be about, in your source package.
  • mark the context object for which the event will be emitted as INotifiable, in notifications.
  • define the event subscriber in notifications and connect it with a proper handler

Todo

And then what happens?

Web notifications

Web notifications is an inbox-like messaging system that shows you a list of incoming events, reverse chronologically (most recent on top).

Features to develop:

  • Notification counter shows number of unread notification messages.
  • Support various event messages as described above under ‘events’
  • Mark read messages as ‘read’ (design todo)
  • Summarize unread messages of the same event type on the same context as one message, for example: “Alex, Jane and John commented on page ‘foobar’ (5 mins ago)” – this should be one notification rather than three.

Async web socket

Todo

Not implemented yet

An async web socket enables pushing of event notifications in semi-real-time, and especially the updating of the unread notifications counter.

Email notifications

Todo

Not implemented yet

To avoid death by spam, while enabling a useful email alert system, notifications by email provide a separate channel in addition to the web notifications channel. Unlike the web channel, users can control the frequency of messages sent via email.

This requires a special configuration panel (design todo), which, for each of the event types described above, gives the user a choice between four frequency options:

  • Immediately
  • Hourly summary
  • Daily summary
  • Never

In addition, the system:

  • Provides sane default frequencies, different for each event type
  • Provides an extra checkbox [ ] do not send email at all