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Frequently Asked Questions v2 |
| FAQ Main / Answer Detail |
How to integrate APC-AA with email
Author: Mitra mitra@mitra.biz |
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There are several places where APC-AA sends mail, and it can be confusing, especially since it is really easy to configure them wrongly so they don't work, and little help for figuring out why. Lets consider 4 cases. The Bugs and Weaknesses of each method are shown because they may help pick which method to use, and also help guide as to places for further development.
Use the Email Notification functionality, here you can specify different messages to be sent when messages are added / edited to Active / Hold bins, and different recipient lists, so for example you can create a message to an Editor whenever a new message arrives in a Hold bin, and maybe a different message to the sysadmin when an item is moved into the Active bin (usually by the Editor). The message could be just something like "An item has been posted in Xyz slice" or by using aliases can include any fields of the item posted.
Bug/Weakness: You can't use aliases in Subject line, this might be fixed in
some version (but is unlikely to be a priority!)
Limitation: The members of the list can only be changed by a slice admin, so
don't use this for Alerts ...
Use a reader management slice (see doc/reader.html) in conjunction with Alerts (doc/alerts.html).
Bug/Weakness: its complex to setup, and frequently people don't succeed, if you don't follow the Tutorial Step by Step (in doc/alerts.html) you probably won't get it to work.
Bug/Weakness: In particular it requires creating an anonymous form, which depends very much on the way its being used (e.g. called from something.shtml or site.php3). One possible development fix would be creating a PHP3 script that took the slice-id of an Alerts module as a parameter and did this much more simply.
Bug/Weakness: documentation says 5.3a: View with type "Alerts Digest", when it means "Alerts Selection Set".
Use a Reader Management Slice (see doc/reader.html) in conjunction with Mailman, APC-AA is used to manage the mailman list
Bug/Weakness: you can no longer manage the lists (subscribe/unsubscribe) by email to the Mailman account once you've done this, mailman will almost certainly be sending out email telling the users they can!
Bug/Weakness: You have to understand both apc-aa AND mailman to get this to work since doc/reader.html refers to tasks that require knowing where to find and how to configure mailman.
Bug/Weakness: There is no link between information in a slice, or discussions, and the email discussion, i.e. this is not - like yahoo groups - a web OR mail interface to the same set of data.
Reports of failure (Jason Diceman) partly due to server setup
See "FAQ/Discussions as Mail List", this allows a field in each item to specify a mailing list.
Bug/Weakness: This field has to be added to every item, it can't be specified at the slice level (make the field Required but not Shown and set a default). This is particularly difficult if you want to retrofit discussions to an existing slice, or something coming in over RSS.
Bug/Weakness: This can only go to a single email address, so you have to manage the list somewhere else outside APC-AA (there is no way to for example link it to Alerts).
Bug/Weakness: It doesn't appear to work, sends blank emails.
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Template for Email | Who gets the email | How sent | Bugs, Limitation and further development |
| Notification | Admin -> Slice -> Email Notification | Directly from script updating |
Can't use aliases in Subject line |
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| Alerts | Admin -> Slice -> Views -> Alerts View | Readers from Reader slice, who can choose which to recieve | By Cron | Complex to setup (anon forms) |
| Email Discussion | Not applicable - its email to email | Members managed by Reader Management slice | Mailman handles all sending |
Requires understanding mailman to setup, reports of failure partly due to server setup |
| Discussion -> Email | Admin -> Slice -> Views -> Discussion to Email | One hard-coded email address | Not sure, probably cron. | Doesn't integrate with Alerts so no recipient management at all Doesn't seem to work (Mitra). Has to be added to each item in slice. |
There is no integration for receiving email, although there has been discussion (where?) about posting articles by mail
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Last Edit: Aug 17 2011
<aafaq id=1663> ~ToDo: 1663 How to integrate APC-AA with email </aafaq>
This FAQ interface was developed by Jason at Commons.ca
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