IDEAS.txt

Ideas for collective.watcherlist
================================

Main idea: Poi currently has a watcher list on an issue.  If you add
your email address, you get notified when a response is added.  The
issue creator is automatically notified and is not on that list (I
think).  If you want to get notified when a new issue is added, I do
not think that is currently possible.  Tracker managers get notified
of all new issues and responses.

So who gets notified why is scattered all over the place.  And the
code for that is mostly inside the content types, including code for
sending emails.

Also, I think the email sending code in Poi is actually quite good,
with lots of bugs squashed.

So we could split the good stuff out into a more general package,
called e.g. collective.watcherlist.  Poi could use that.


Basic ideas, handy for Poi
--------------------------

- Keep a list of watchers on an object.

- Allow username (currently logged in user) or email address.

- An event handler takes care of sending emails to all watchers.

- Acquisition: if you are watching an issue tracker, you should get
  emails for the issues within it as well.  So allow subscribing to
  subobject changes if that makes sense.

- Add footer like this: "You are getting this email because <reason>."
  That could mean we need a different email for each address.

- Add unsubscribe option in each email.  That could also mean we need
  a different email for each address as for everyone that could be a
  different link.  In the case of Poi you can be watching an issue or
  a tracker.

- First version could simply only allow subscribing and unsubscribing
  to logged in users.  Makes things a lot simpler, without the need
  for PasswordResetTool-like confirmation emails.

- Weird idea: could email-address subscribing be done in a PAS plugin?
  Probably just silly. :-)

- Register content type specific emails.
  queryUtility((context, request), name='notification_email')
  or
  queryUtility((event, context), name='notification_email')

- Plain text, restructured text (Poi tries this), html?

- Poi: subscribe managers automatically to additions of issues and
  responses.

- Look at possible overlap with plone.app.contentrules.


Ideas in the context of news letters
------------------------------------

- Allow triggering an event that mails the current page to all
  subscribers/watchers.

- Export subscribers list.

- Allow only member subscriptions yes/no.

- Allow text/html yes/no.

- Convert relative to absolute urls.