[Zope-Annce] zope.org wikis subscribable

[Ken Manheimer]

In the interest of making it easier to track the development collaboration
going on in zope.org wikis, you can now subscribe to email notifications
about changes to any of the wiki pages.

Some of you may have noticed that the all zope.org wiki page footers have
grown a "Subscriptions" link in the past few days.  This takes you to a
page where logged-in visitors can subscribe and unsubscribe to
notifications about changes of that particular page, to current and
future offspring of the page, and/or to changes of all pages in the wiki.
We've basically finished the implementation and have tested a bit, and it
looks ready to roll.

The zope.org wikis have proven to be very effective in enabling people to
help formulate and comment on development efforts.  However, as their use
has grown, and it's become easier for people to contribute feedback eg by
commenting, it has gotten much too hard for anyone to keep an eye on the
items that interest them.  We're expecting that email notifications will
correct this, by providing active, immediate notifications about changes
directly to the subscriber.

In the interest of making the notifications, themselves, manageble, we've
tried to put information in the headers for easy sorting/foldering.  See
the NotificationFormat page in the project wiki for details:

  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/FishbowlNotificationsForNow/NotificationFormat

We also want to make it easy to keep track of and disable your existing
subscriptions.  We were able to do that for per-page subscriptions by
cataloging them in a special site index, with a link on the subscriptions
page launches to a search which identifies all the page-specific
subscriptions for your userid.  Unfortunately, the current implementation
does not allow for cataloging the wiki-wide folder subscriptions - you'll
have to track those down as you get notices for them.

We'll be getting new experience with notifications for large numbers of
users, so some adjustment may be necessary as we see the usage scale.
We'll be posting followups here as relevant.

(This addition of notifications was implemented with only a small time
window, possible because we could use code that simon michael recently
developed for the original ZWiki (on which zope.org's WikiForNow is
based).  The give and take between ZWiki and WikiForNow has been very good
- i know it's been beneficial for zope.org and zope corp, and understand
that ZWiki has benefitted from work done in WikiForNow.  It's a good
collaboration - thanks simon!)

-- 
Ken
klm@zope.com