< Blocklist | Variables | Basic Variables >
administrators (basic)
The notify.php
script allows a site administrator to configure PmWiki to send email messages whenever pages are changed on the wiki site. Notifications can be configured so that multiple page changes over a short period of time are combined into a single email message (to avoid flooding mailboxes).
This feature is useful for sites and pages that have infrequent updates, as it eliminates the need to frequently check RecentChanges
pages just to see if anything has changed.
In order for notifications to work, the notify.php
script must be enabled in the site's local customization. Usually this is as simple as placing the following in local/config.php
:
$EnableNotify
= 1;
Notification configuration
Once enabled, the notification system gets its configuration from the SiteAdmin.NotifyList? wiki page. The SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
page contains entries of the form:
notify=alice@example.com
This says that information about page changes should be periodically emailed to alice@example.com
. The SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
page can contain multiple "notify=" lines to cause notifications to be sent to multiple addresses; the "notify=" lines can be concealed by placing them inside of an (:if false:)
conditional section on the page.
NOTE: Do not put any spaces around the equal sign! Notifications will fail silently if you have... This is a really easy mistake to make because all of the other assignments have spaces around the equal sign.
Notification options
The basic syntax is
group=Group1,Group2 name=-*.WikiSandbox
A number of options exist for limiting the pages that result in a notification. The group=
and name=
parameters can be used to restrict notifications to specific pages or groups:
# send notifications about the Main group to alice@example.com
notify=alice@example.com group=Main
# notify bob@example.com of any changes to the home page
notify=bob@example.com name=Main.HomePage
# notify charles@example.com of changes to pages except in Main
notify=charles@example.com group=-Main
(Note: The options are similar to the PageList syntax.)
trail=TrailPage?
For maintaining arbitrary lists of pages, i.e., "watchlists", it's generally easier to build a trail of pages to be watched. The following entry in SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
will send alice@example.com
an email containing changes to any of the pages listed in the Profiles.Alice
trail:
# notify Alice of changes to pages listed in Profiles.Alice
notify=alice@example.com trail=Profiles.Alice
Note that once this entry has been added to SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
, Alice can easily change her watchlist by editing the Profiles.Alice
page, and doesn't need to edit the SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
page. In particular, this means that an administrator can restrict editing of SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
, yet allow individuals to maintain custom watchlists in other pages.
Limitations of this feature:
- only manually-added links on a trail will be acknowledged by the Notify List (no "group=" or other pagelist syntax, nor any "
Group.RecentChanges?
" links, will generate notifications). See also$NotifyRelatedTrailFmt
. - using an
(:include:)
directive on the pageSiteAdmin.NotifyList?
is not an operational work-around. - PageTextVariables are not resolved - you can't get the notification mail address from the profile page.
SiteAdmin.NotifyList? should be protected
This is probably a good place to point out that edit access to SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
should be controlled, otherwise malicious persons can use the notification capability to flood others' electronic mailboxes. By default, SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
is blocked against reading or edits except by the admin (as is the case for most pages in the SiteAdmin
group).
Adding notification entries via local customizations
Notification entries can also be added via the
array in $NotifyList
local/config.php
. Simply add a line like the following:
$EnableNotify
= 1;
$NotifyList
[] = 'notify=alice@example.com group=Main';
$NotifyList
[] = 'notify=bob@example.com name=Main.HomePage';
Controlling notification frequency
To prevent flooding of recipients' mailboxes, the notify script uses a "squelch" value as the minimum amount of time that must elapse between messages sent to any given email address. The default squelch setting is 10800 seconds (three hours), which means that once a recipient address is sent a notification message, it will not receive another for at least three hours. Any edits that occur during the squelch interval are queued for the next notification message.
The site administrator can change the default squelch interval via the
parameter
$NotifySquelch
# enable notifications
$EnableNotify
= 1;
$NotifySquelch
= 86400; # wait at least one day (in seconds) between notifications
In addition, individual addresses can specify a custom squelch parameter in the SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
page:
# Alice receives at most one email per day
notify=alice@example.com squelch=86400
# Bob can get notifications hourly
notify=bob@example.com trail=Profiles.Bob squelch=3600
# Charles uses the site default squelch
notify=charles@example.com
Controlling notification delay
Because a page will often receive several edits in rapid succession (e.g., a long post followed by several minor edits), a site administrator can also set a
value that specifies how long to wait after an initial post before sending notifications:
$NotifyDelay
# enable notifications
$EnableNotify
= 1;
$NotifySquelch
= 86400; # wait at least one day between notifications
$NotifyDelay
= 300; # wait five minutes after initial post
Note that the squelch and delay values are minimums; notifications are sent on the first execution of PmWiki after the delay period has expired. For inactive sites, this could be much longer than the specified delay periods. This isn't really considered an issue since timely notifications are less important on relatively inactive sites. However, changes within the squelch time after the last notification will remain unnoticed if the wiki is not even visited for a long period after. If this matters it might be necessary to make the server call pmwiki.php
regularly (e.g. cron job).
Custom delay parameters cannot be specified for individual addresses in the SiteAdmin.NotifyList? page:
# the delay= parameter will be ignored
notify=edgar@example.com trail=Profiles.Edgar delay=600
Related pages (trail)
Time zone
Since PmWiki 2.3.0, individual users can configure the date and time stamps to show in their own timezone, for example:
notify=edgar@example.com [other arguments] tz=Europe/Paris
Find your timezone in this list of supported timezones.
Note for Windows installations
Sites running PHP under Windows may not have PHP's mail function configured correctly. Such sites may need to add a line like
ini_set('SMTP','smtp.server.com');
to config.php
, where smtp.server.com
is the name of your host's preferred outgoing mail server. You may also need to set the sendmail_from value if that is not configured:
ini_set('sendmail_from','noreply@foo.com');
Notify Variables
- %apply=item id=EnableNotify?%
$EnableNotify
- Tells
stdconfig.php
to enable the notify script. $EnableNotify
= 1; # enable notify$EnableNotify
= 0; # disable notify- %apply=item id=MailFunction?%
$MailFunction
- The function to call when sending a message, default the built-in PHP function mail. If you have some custom e-mailing solution or library, place here the function to be called with the same arguments as
mail($to, $subject, $message, $additional_headers)
. - %apply=item id=NotifyFrom?%
$NotifyFrom
- Return email address to be used in the sent email.
$NotifyFrom
= 'wiki@example.com';$NotifyFrom
= 'Wiki server <wiki@example.com>';- %apply=item id=NotifyDelay?%
$NotifyDelay
- The length of time (seconds) to wait before sending mail after the first post. Defaults to zero - posts are sent as soon as any squelch period has expired.
$NotifyDelay
= 300; # send mail 5+ min after first post- %apply=item id=NotifySquelch?%
$NotifySquelch
- The default minimum time (seconds) that must elapse between sending mail messages. Useful when
is set to a small value to keep the number of mail notification messages down. Defaults to 10800 (three hours). Individual recipients can override this value in the$NotifyDelay
SiteAdmin.NotifyList?
page. $NotifySquelch
= 43200; # wait 12+ hours between mailings- %apply=item id=NotifyRelatedTrailFmt?%
$NotifyRelatedTrailFmt
- Enables notifications for pages related to the pages in the trail. For example:
$NotifyRelatedTrailFmt = '{$FullName}-Talk,{$FullName}-Users';
# will notify not only about changes to a page on the trail, but also about changes to pages with suffixes "-Talk" and "-Users" to any page on the trail.- %apply=item id=NotifyItemFmt?%
$NotifyItemFmt
- The text to be sent for each changed item in the post. The string "
$PostTime
" is substituted with the time of the post (controlled by
below).$NotifyTimeFmt
# default
$NotifyItemFmt
= ' * $FullName . . . $PostTime by$Author
';# include the page's URL in the message
$NotifyItemFmt
= " * \$FullName . . . \$PostTime by \$Author
\n \$PageUrl";# include the change summary and link to the page's history in the message
$NotifyItemFmt
= " * {\$FullName} . . . \$PostTime by {\$Author
}\n Summary: {\$LastModifiedSummary}\n {\$PageUrl}?action=diff";- %apply=item id=NotifyTimeFmt?%
$NotifyTimeFmt
- The format for dates/times in
$PostTime
above. Defaults to the value of
.$TimeFmt
$NotifyTimeFmt
= '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M'; # 2004-03-20 17:44- %apply=item id=NotifyBodyFmt?%
$NotifyBodyFmt
- The body of the message to be sent. The string "
$NotifyItems
" is replaced with the list of posts (as formatted by
above). Use single quotation marks ' to prevent substring "$NotifyItemFmt
$NotifyItems
" from being untimely evaluated as variable inconfig.php
. $NotifyBodyFmt
= "Changed items:\n\n" . '$NotifyItems' . "\n\n Best regards...";- %apply=item id=NotifySubjectFmt?%
$NotifySubjectFmt
- The subject line of the mail to be sent.
- %apply=item id=NotifyHeaders?%
$NotifyHeaders
- String of extra mail headers to be passed to the
mail()
function. - %apply=item id=NotifyParameters?%
$NotifyParameters
- String of additional parameters to be passed to PHP's
mail()
function [1]. - %apply=item id=NotifyFile?%
$NotifyFile
- The scratch file where Notify keeps track of recent posting information. Defaults to
"$WorkDir/.notifylist"
. Note that this file must generally be writable by the webserver process. - %apply=item id=NotifyListPageFmt?%
$NotifyListPageFmt
- The name of the page containing
notify=
lines for use bynotify.php
. Defaults to$SiteAdminGroup.NotifyList
. - %apply=item id=NotifyList?%
$NotifyList
- An array of
notify=
specifications that can be specified from a local customization file (used in addition to entries in SiteAdmin.NotifyList?). # send notifications to alice@example.com
$NotifyList
[] = 'notify=alice@example.com';- %apply=item id=EnableNotifySubjectEncode?%
$EnableNotifySubjectEncode
- Apply a standard (base64) encoding for the e-mail subject. Notify e-mails from international wikis may otherwise have unreadable subjects (added for version 2.2.2).
$EnableNotifySubjectEncode
= 1; # encode subject$EnableNotifySubjectEncode
= 0; # use subject as is (default)- To fix encodings with the message body, add to
config.php
the following line (after XLPage? and/or UTF-8):
$NotifyHeaders
= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=$Charset\r\n";
Notification only for major edits
It is possible to send notifications only in case of major edits. In your config.php
, replace "
" with the following:
$EnableNotify
=1;
if ( @$_POST['diffclass'] != 'minor' )
$EnableNotify
=1;
This way, only 'major' edits send notify messages (when the author doesn't select the checkbox for minor edit). If you want minor edits and not major edits to send the message then you would use:
if ( @$_POST['diffclass'] == 'minor' )
$EnableNotify
=1;
instead.
Disabling notifications for downloads
If you use "$EnableDirectDownloads=0;
" (eg. for privacy on a password-protected wiki) then attached images may generate duplicate notification messages. To prevent that disable notifications for downloads via
if ( $action != 'download' )
$EnableNotify
=1;
That way, only page views (and not images within the page) will generate notifications. See PITS:01159 for more information.
< Blocklist | Variables | Basic Variables >
This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Notify, and a talk page: PmWiki:Notify-Talk.