Question

I would like to know whether TWiki can replace a web application we are using. It is a slightly modified guestbook used to record machine breakdowns and repairs.

Members of a small team record events via a web form, and the new info is (1) time-stamped and appended to the page, and (2) emailed to members of the group.

I can see how to do this with TWiki, except for sending out the email so that people without web browsers can read exactly the new text in their email. Is there perhaps a feature or add-on that I've overlooked?

• TWiki version: Dec2001
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: FreeBSD
• Web browser: Lynx,Netscape
• Client OS: FreeBSD

-- SueBlake - 07 Jul 2002

Answer

Sure enough TWiki has something like that: It's called WebNotify, see TWiki.WebChangesAlert.

You need to:

1. Create a TWiki "web" (basically a directory, hopefully web will get renamed to zone soon.
2. Set up a cron job to check additions into this web as often as needed (even every 10 minutes?)
3. All subscribed team members will get emails with link to page with changes, so they can edit/share info about it. IMHO it is better than getting email with text and then polluting the INBOX with "reply to all" messages.

-- PeterMasiar - 08 Jul 2002

Thanks Peter. We're doing that now, and it works great. Trouble is, many of the people don't have email programs that can follow web links, are receiving email on text-only systems, working across 2400 baud connections, collecting mail by POP3 and disconnecting, etc etc.

If they get a link they will only say hmm, somebody has written on that web page. When they get text saying "Cable cut by excavation work. Northern section of WAN down for emergency repairs this afternoon, Tuesday 9 July. Hopefully it will be fixed before 5pm", the recipients will know to ignore their own related networking troubles until 5, or hop over to the NOC and see if they can offer assistance. A link tells them nothing, and that's exactly what they'll do with it.

I have another program that will do this, but I was hoping to move away from it. If TWiki can't be coaxed into mailing out the necessary text, maybe a better strategy would be to keep using the old program and modify it to also append the new text to a single TWiki topic page. Someone can go in manually and move text from that page to the relevant TWikiTopic. But then we can't have the advantages of forms for classification and statistics.

-- SueBlake - 08 Jul 2002

You are asking for an app that sends out an e-mail whenever a change is done to a topic. This sounds like an extension realized as a plugin, perhaps a ChangeNotifyPlugin.

<brainstorming>

• Set up a ticket system like here in the Support web
• The form has a field for e-mail addresses or WikiNames
• Create a plugin that sends out an e-mail to everyone in the list each time the topic is saved
• The e-mail has just the changes of the latest version (or possibly the whole topic content.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Jul 2002

a kludge

Rather than trying to force TWiki into doing something it is not optimised for, I've thought of a small kludge that will give us what we're used to without a lot of messing around.

I used to have a little program that checked a file for a size change, a bit like biff. When I remember what it was, I'll plug it into this script, and get cron to run the script every couple of minutes. Or maybe the size-checking program would do it without cron. I can't remember, but I will.

#!/bin/sh
if # test here for changed file size of CurrentEvents.txt,v
then
   rcsdiff /path/to/CurrentEvents.txt | mail -s "New Event (date)" tom@ourdomain,dick@ourdomain,harry@ourdomain
fi

Grrr, date should be in backticks but I couldn't type them

Actually I'll throw in some variables so that we can monitor a few pages at once, maybe use a different rcsdiff format, but you get the general drift. I'll insert the missing info later, unless someone beats me to it.

-- SueBlake - 09 Jul 2002