Overview

Priority: High

This extension provides an integrated subscription module to be able to send notifications from omcollab components to a users' email and via RSS.

Subscription functionality will include:

• Digests from the omCollab forum
  
• Posts from the omCollab blog
  
• Featured articles from the omCollab wiki
  

Users can signup at registered as per attached and through a link on the left hand sidebar

Objective

We want to make the subscription process easier in two ways:

1. We want to try and get the user to subscribe when they first register for the site as this is the best time to get them engaged. Therefore, we want to have a subscription checkbox here:  Sigunup page (above the "remember me" box)
   

2. We also want to have an easy-to-access portlet that will be displayed along the left-hand-navigation of each tab.
   

Blog Subscriptions

Blog subscription enables the sending of post via email or RSS.

• Subscribe2 functionality for subscribing to blog posts can be leveraged but may potentially be simplified so that users don't subscribe at the category level
  
• Issue with existing system requires manually DB update
  

Wiki featured articles

Whenever an article is selected as "featured" as per the content featuring extension it will show up on the front page and to subscribing users via RSS and email.

Wiki articles of interest are articles that are selected by an administrator as being the best articles that we want to showcase. An administrator will select an article via a specialpage in a very similar fashion to how we currently select a contributor to feature on the front page. The page will then appear within a portlet on the front page, just how the Welcome article appears on the home page today.

Those articles that are selected as "featured articles", this will only be changed once in a while (perhaps once a week) will also send an email notification out to subscribers.

Subscription Administration

An admin will be able to see the full list of subscribers. That way, we can easily see how many people are subscribing to content and also manually change subscriptions if needed (admins have rights to modify users' subscriptions). The new table will have the following new fields:

• userId Int
  
• Forum Digests (y/n)
  
• Blog Posts (y/n)
  
• Featured articles (y/n)
  

Design considerations

• Subscriptions should be available via RSS and email
  
• A general approach should be provided for adding future subscriptions
  
• It should be determined whether to send blog posts and featured articles in a digest fashion (e.g. weekly) or when they are posted

Technical design notes