Plone Subscription (1.6.3)

Overview

PloneSubscription: A Plone tool for managing subscriptions

The tool allows members and administrators to manage user and group subscription for content as well as for keyword searches. Content subscription can be done recursively and with the possibility to filter for documents that were recently subject to a workflow transition.

There is a special tool for managing mail templates for subscription mails sent by PloneSubscription. The template system is fairly simple for the moment, but we are looking for improvement proposals to make it more powerful.

Usage

Plone members will find a new icon document action (on the right side under the title), which allows them to quickly subscribe to content. Subscription is done with a single click, and doesn't disturb the member any further.

Users can check their subscriptions by clicking on "my subscriptions" link, available in the user action box. The link to "my subscriptions" is only shown when a user is already subscribed to something.

Another way of subscribing to content is after doing a search in Plone. In a special portlet, the member can choose to subscribe to the search he just made. This feature is only available for a simple Plone search, and will ignore any advanced search options that may have been chosen.

Subscriptions can also be managed on a per group basis, but as this is an advanced feature it is only available for members who explicitly get the "PlacelessSubscription: Manage Content" permission.

With this permission, an administrative user can add group subscriptions in just three clicks. First click on the "grouped subscription" tab on the current content, select the groups to subscribe, and click on save, and you are done.

The permission also allows access to the PloneSubscription tool in the Plone Control Panel.

Some noteworthy options of the PloneSubscription tool are:

The 'show actions' option, which adds extra tabs on folderish objects for quickly adding subsciption and mail template providers locally. This is mostly interesting while doing through the web development.

The 'periodicity' defines after which period of time the subscriptions are sent. You can send hourly, daily, weekly and yearly subscriptions.

The 'Base url' field is used to replace a url like 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/plone' by 'http://mydomain.com/' in the link provided in the sent mails.

Mail sent is managed with templates stored in a specific repository. It's easy to add new variables to the template namespace. The next release of PloneSubscription will focus on a refactoring of these templates so that they are more subscription centric instead of type centric.

Advanced Usage

Your users should not need access the subscription objects themselves, so the "PlacelessSubscription: Manage Content" permission is not given to Members any more.

The best practice is to make sure the subscriptions are already added the right way by passing in the correct parameters as it is done in the portlet:

In this case you need to set the ptype to the subscription type you want and specify the parameters in advance.

Required Products

• Plone 2.5.0
• DataGridField 1.0
• PloneMaintenance 1.1 - Make sure to install PloneMaintenance before PloneSubscription - Really recommended, but requirement is not enforced - Can be useful to send out scheduled notifications automatically

Installation

Installing PloneMaintenance

• Unpack it into your Zope Products Folder
• Restart Zope
• Use portal_quickinstaller to install the PloneMaintenance in ZMI (or use plone_setup in pmi)
• Setup a scheduler interface as said in PloneMaintenance/README.txt

Installing PloneSubscription

• Unpack it into your Zope Products Folder
• Restart Zope
• Use portal_quickinstaller to install the PloneSubscription in ZMI (or use plone_setup in pmi)