Question

I installed MailerContrib and expected some sort of "email me when this topic changes" link or cmd or field or something...right on the topic page.

I see no such thing after having installed it. Further, after reading the docs for this Plugin, it appears one must go to a WebNotify topic (or something similar) and program it correctly in order to work correctly?

If so, while I realize this can be a powerful approach, it's also a cumbersome approach for my users. I'm a quite surprised that the "approved" notification method for Dakar does not have an easier approach for users.

In any case...

Can I install both MailerContrib AND another plugin that can better assist my users like describe above? Or is it mutually exclusive? And if there is a plugin that works well, which one would you recommend?

Thanks for any help!

Additions

Well, I looked at ImmediateWebNotifyPerTopic which seems to be the only thing I could discern that handles an input at the topic page for email notification. (Maybe there's others?)

The aforementioned topic is so cryptic with no organization...

I'm so disappointed. I'm starting to believe that I really don't have much of a chance to set up an effective TWiki for my small business. I didn't to have to do it, but I'm afraid I will just have to go back to the simplicity of MediaWiki; their support "community" and lack of flexibility drove me to TWiki in the first place...but after seeing the complexity of TWiki setup and the learning curve for me as the admin (and any other admins I wish to train) as well as how many changes I need to make for an out-of-box TWiki to make it "simple" for my users and to train them on it as well.... I just don't see how I have any choice. I don't seem to have the time and personnel resources to devote to TWiki.

I truly am disappointed. I had such high hopes for TWiki. I'm sure one could get it where it needs to be...but not for me in my startup business.

Maybe I'll wake up and change my mind in the morning, especially if I get some more answers on email notification...but I fear I'm going to have the same difficulty of installation no matter what plugin I try.

For what it's worth, I had been keeping track of a lot of things I thought would be useful to do to make it easier for a user/admin like myself in my situation to assimilate with TWiki; maybe I can get to writing that up for the TWiki community someday. I must admit that my motivation to do that has decreased because of how much difficulty I've had with installation and configuration and learning.

Hopefully I can break out these latter comments in another support topic for future reference.

Assuming I do move on to another Wiki software: I really, REALLY appreciate all the help and support I've received here. I really wish I could get the same from the MediaWiki folks (but I probably won't).

Take care and best of luck.

-- MattEngland - 15 Apr 2005

Environment

-- MattEngland - 15 Apr 2005

Answer

Hi Matt. Don't know how your decision will turn out but this following approach to mailnotify may be of interest and remove a task from your users. I'm assuming that you want all the users to be notified of changes to certain work related webs. What you might want to consider is:

1. Setting up a TWiki Group within which you place users as they register.
2. Add the name of the group to the relevant mail notify topic pages.

Result will be that users in the group are notified without having to add their names individually to the mailnotify topic.

Of course this might not suit users who only want to find out about changes in certain webs. Perhaps you could set up groups on a sectional basis e.g. sales, marketing, production, kind of idea and identify appropriate webs for each group rather than a blamket approach.

And yes you need to set up a cron job to get mailnotify to work. This took me a while to work out but I've got it going now after a few false starts. Works like a dream now.

Its been good to have you here on TWiki and have you ask these questions. Sometimes it seems to me as a person who reads the stuff on Codev with interest without the technology skills to contribute but as a fully committed TWiki manager that TWiki floats between some very difficult to implement solutions and some amazingly simple solutions. At times I trip up thinking that a complex solution is needed, when its a really simple tweak that makes something work.

I think much of this comes down to documentation. There are very simple ways of doing TWiki that after 18 months of TWiki'ing are becoming clearer. I've oftem thought about putting up a kind of absolute beginners guide to TWiki for people who aren't perl or Linux hackers. I'm neither of those but I've worked my way through some frustrating times and I just love TWiki. Its absolutely amazing. But it has many layers and some of the simplification needed I think is a bit like having guided steps for beginners, intermediate, advanced etc. Its like any technology - beginners find it hard to see what is significant amongst all the noise. Anyway just musings; a final note - when the purpose of global variables and the functionality of perl finally filtered through my cluttered mind I had an ahah experience. TWiki maintenance since that time has become hugely easier. I wish someone had hammered it into my head at the start.

-- SueLocke - 15 Apr 2005

Matt - we'd be sorry to see you go. It is true that we lose people because our solutions are not simple enough. This project is truly like herding rabbits - everyone goes off and does their own thing. We get the exploration phase of ExplorationThenConsolidation with gusto, but consolidation, where alignment needing trade-offs, throwing away code and deleting obsolete content happens much less than it should. In this case witness ConsolidateNotification - what you want is "Subscribe interface in view topic", a feature that is not available in MailerContrib.

If you need this feature and do not have the time to put behind it, perhaps your company can fund its development? CrawfordCurrie wrote MailerContrib, if he is too busy right now he can surely point you at someone who can implement this for you; naturally the maintenance cost ends up being shared by the whole community.

Such OpenSourceFunding carrots are always a good thing - people want to be GettingPaidToDevelopTWiki

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Apr 2005