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New Posting Notification With Text

1 Requirements

The notification about new postings in wikis, blogs and forums is a very important feature when you use these tools in a collaborative scenario. This is because you need to react sometimes on new postings in time but you do not always browse these objects to see immediately what has changed or been added.
 
At the time being (4.3) ILIAS sends the following notifications:

Object Type	New Posting	Edit Posting	Comment Posting
Blog	Simple notification without content	Simple notification without content	Notification with (text) content
Forum	Notification with (text) content	No notification	Not possible (Public comments not supported in Forum)
Wiki	Simple notification without content	Simple notification without content	Notification with (text) content

It would be very helpful and improving the usability of ILIAS if the notifications on new postings could also come with the posting's content (or even with a part of it). But I see two problems that need to be tackled:

1. Blog or wiki postings do not only consists of pure text like a comment. They could start with a table in which several pictures are embedded before the first phrase of text appears. So ILIAS might not be able to deliver such content to the mail system and to the user's mail inbox.
2. While blog postings are actively "published", wiki postings don't. The first notification is triggered by creating the page (without any content). So ILIAS could not say anything more in such a notification as that a new page has been created.

Add 1: I think the more information one gets the better it is! If I have a choice between messages with no content and those with a bit of content I prefer those with a bit content. It gives me a first impression about what is currently happening in a blog or wiki. Knowing only the page title is not always satisfying. A possible solution could be:

• It would be sufficient to get the first available text phrases of the posting - if this can be extracted from the page. And it doesn't matter if this text is maybe difficult to understand when one has not seen the picture to which this text belongs to. But if it sounds interesting for the user, she or he can click on the link to read the entire posting. I believe that many wiki and blog posting start with a text so there will be something meaningful to deliver. The first paragraph of a wiki page or blog would be sufficient. We could even think about a limit of characters - in case an author writes a full page in one paragraph. But this misuse of the editor will propbably end with the new feature "Save And Add New".

Add 2: We could think about introducing a "publish" action to wikis, too. This would allow to create a new page and fill it with content without sending notifications already. Once the page is ready to read in a first version, the author publishs it and a notification is sended. This might also reduce the number of notificiation send by ILIAS when a new page is created.

Suggested Implementation for 4.5

The requirements above and the comments of the Jour Fixe would allow the following implementation:

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Release 5.0 (was 4.4)
• Funding: Funded by ILIAS-Verein
• Maintainer: Jörg Lützenkirchen
• Implementation of the feature is done by Jörg Lützenkirchen, Leifos
• Contract settled: YES
• Tested by / status: Matthias Kunkel, testing completed

3 Additional Information

• If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: Matthias Kunkel

4 Discussion

JF 5 Feb 2013: We agree that this notifications could be improved.

• Including the first text paragraph of a blog posting, when the posting is published is feasible.
• A publish action for wikis should be avoided, if this conflicts with the collaborative editing of all pages. We could delay the first notification of a wiki page to the time when a first content element is saved into the page. If this is a text element, the text could be included in the notification.

We open the discussion for everyone and schedule the development for 4.4.

Matthias Kunkel, 24 Oct 2013: Feature is postponed to 4.5 due to missing time and resources to implement it.

Matthias Kunkel, October 29, 2014: We should solve a usability problem before asking for final acceptance for the feature, see Mantis 14387: Too much notifications when editing published blog posting.

5 Implementation

JL 24 Feb 2014: an abstract is now included in the Wiki and Blog notifications in trunk/4.5. The abstract is generated using the implementation of Improving Overview Page of Postings.

• The notification text consists of text only. If the posting starts with an image, the next text is taken for the notification. A placeholder for the image is not presented.
• The notification distinguishes between creating a new posting and editing an existing one in the notification text, e.g.: Hello John Doe, the notification text was created / has been updated.