CUNY Academic Commons

-- Do others agree that RBE should be enabled on Doc comments?

Right now, the email notifications are not really useful for BP Docs as only the action is stated in the email. (This is generated by the Group Email Subscription plugin.)

eg.

admin created the doc My Doc in the group My Group

To view or reply, log in and go to:
http://URL

---------------------
To disable all notifications for this group, click: http://URL

Your email setting for this group is: All Email

While the forum post email notifications lists the full reply in the email, which makes RBE useful when replying.

In order to make this useful for BP Docs, the full doc (or an excerpt of it) should be posted in the body of the email so people could reply to something.

Just to note that I wouldn't use RBE for doc edits or doc deletions, but only for docs that I choose to subscribe to or perhaps newly-created docs.

-- To what extent is that possible?
-- How big of a job would that be?

We'd have to write an add-on for RBE similar to how RBE did for the Group Email Subscription (GES) plugin.

GES already handled the subscription and email sendouts, which made writing an extension for RBE a little easier.

If we were to write an extension for BP Docs, we'd have to write:

• A subscription component for BP Docs - This could be a feature for BP Docs. At the bare minimum, create a checkbox field under a group doc's "Discussion" with a label like "Subscribe to comments for this doc". This is so RBE is enabled on a doc-by-doc basis. Once that is done, write:
• A RBE listener to handle posting the replies to the BP Doc - shouldn't be too hard. It would be similar to how RBE implemented the feature for GES. Once the subscription component is written for BP Docs, we'd have to disable new doc sendouts from GES with their group activity filter.

Right now, the email notifications are not really useful for BP Docs as only the action is stated in the email. (This is generated by the Group Email Subscription plugin.)

That's not quite true, though, since comments on BP Docs are emailed in full, just like forum posts. What I'm asking about is adding RBE on BP Doc Comments only (the comment section appears below the Doc itself). This would presume that the first comment would be added through the website, but that subsequent replies could be handled by RBE.

It may seem strange to add RBE to just one part of the BP Doc process, but from a user perspective, the experience of receiving an email notification of a comment on a BP Doc is not much different from receiving a notification of a forum post. Indeed, that's why people sometimes get confused about where a conversation has taken place -- in a forum discussion or in the comment section under a Doc. All I can tell you is that having received notifications of comments on a BP Doc tonight, I would have liked to have been able to hit "reply" from my email client to respond.

And that's a tribute to how awesome RBE is!

That's not quite true, though, since comments on BP Docs are emailed in full, just like forum posts.

Ahh, gotcha! I thought you were talking primarily about new docs! Wasn't even thinking about the doc comments sent out by the Group Email Subscription plugin.

Doesn't sound too hard. Will look into it and get back to you, Matt!

Thanks so much, Ray! However, can you wait until tomorrow to get started? Let's give other members of the team to object if they'd like to. Perhaps we can say that if no one objects by 3pm tomorrow, we can move forward with this?

RBE to BP Doc comments seems like a very good idea. I feel like some of our most robust team discussions have occurred in the comments on a BP Doc.

Thanks, Michael.

I'm wishing redmine had RBE about now :)

I think adding RBE to the comments on the doc is fine. While it may be a little odd that we only have RBE for one part of the BP Docs, it stays within the logic that we do RBE only when someone writes some text aimed at the group and that what they wrote is contained in the email. I think the only reason not to previously was that the response showed up in the activity stream and not by the actual comment. This would solve that issue.

Alright, did some work last night to create an extension class that will make it easier for 3rd-party plugins to register themselves with RBE.

I've almost completed work on the BP Docs RBE comments extension itself. The last thing I'm working on is the permission checks since a BP Doc has three comment settings:

1. All group members can comment to the doc
2. Only group admins / mods can comment to the doc
3. No one can comment on the doc.

Options 1 and 3 are done. I still have to implement no. 2. This setting is going to cause a few problems, because the Group Email Subscription (GES) plugin does all the email sending in groups and I need to find a way to limit sendouts RBE for this option to group admins and mods only. I'm looking into it.

Just to note that group members will need to have their "Group Email" setting set to "All Mail" in order to reply to BP Doc comments.

Just to update everyone, I've worked out the issues with BP Docs and is pretty much good to go.

Since this is targeted for 1.5, I haven't pushed the changes yet. But, if everyone is eager to test, we can move this back to 1.4.x.

Thanks so much, Ray. I'll leave the version issue at Boone's discretion.

Ray, could you commit it to the master branch and push it up? I'll make a judgement on milestone based on how funky the changeset is :)

Okay, it's up on master branch in commit e7a69eb.

This merges a bunch of other fixes from previous commits, but the main stuff you should be looking at is the new abstract BP_Reply_By_Email_Extension class and the BP_Docs_Comment_RBE_Extension class.

Let me know what you think!

Yes, thanks Ray. I took a quick look at your code and while I'm not an expert at WP or BP I want to give you kudos for some clean, well documented code and great logic on handling different states that RBE needs to anticipate.

The reason I was looking at the code was to see what kind of messages it sent out to the user and to start thinking about HTML email. I think you did a good job with the messages; clear and simple (maybe you can talk to Microsoft about the "error at X0s3t4w3tersd" type messages).

However, two forward looking questions for you and Boone and anyone else who might care to comment. (if I'm getting ahead of things Boone let me know).
1. Should the text of these messages be put in a file or some place where a non-technical person could modify them (or someone who installed CBox and didn't want to have to look through code)?
2. Will RBE (both the normal emails and the error messages sent out) be part of any HTML email we might do?

(if I'm getting ahead of things Boone let me know).

You are, and this is out of the scope of this ticket :) But, briefly:
1. For now, it'll be possible to change these with a language pack, in the same way that you change text in any other WordPress plugin. If we get feedback from the community that they need easier access to the error text, we can consider adding admin UI for a future version.
2. When we switch to HTML email, all messages will become HTML-powered, unless we specifically blacklist some email types. We'll specify some generic HTML and styles to wrap around existing mail content, and deliver a text-only message in the metadata so that the client can decide which will be rendered. I'll be opening a master ticket for HTML email soon.

Thanks for the indulgence Boone, and thanks again Ray.

Hey Ray - is this covered by https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/6ef51b83e69246212ddcd2ec30cf1e6e82798b9c?

Thanks, Ray!

In the 1.4.x branch, BP Docs comments support is now added to RBE in commit f79e1ef.

It's up on cdev if you guys want to test.

I'm going to leave this issue open for a bit just in case there are any last-minute bugs.