Sphene Community Tools

Hi,
I'm currently signed on to an specialist email group. They are looking at moving to a forum based system rather than email. As has happened so many times before some are enthusiastic about a forum whilst others want to stay with getting all postings sent to them via email. Now on another group I subscribe to the owner solved this by using UltraBB for the forum. Users could then opt to receive and post via email rather than logging into a web forum. Thus keeping both camps happy!

Unfortunately UltraBB is a commercial package with costs the group can ill afford. So my question is this, can SCT forum email a daily listing of latest posts to an email subscribers list and can SCT forum accept posts via email? I'm fairly new to Django so I would prefer something out of the box, however I'm not afraid of delving into the code if that is required to get it to work.

I'd just appreciate some guidance to know whether this is workable via SCT, because the rest of the feature set looks good for what we want

Regards

Adrian Cherry

hi,

well .. there is already a "monitor" feature which will send you emails as soon as someone posts a new thread/post ..

if i understand you correctly there are two missing features 1.) sending digest emails once a day about new threads and posts, 2.) convert emails to new postings ?

i think the second feature should be the easy one :) it just requires an email alias which invokes a python script to create the new post.. the first one is a bit tricky since it requires to have a cronjob which checks for every user if there is a new forum post ..

well .. have i understood your requirement correctly ? :)

both should be doable.. if you would be willing to switch to SCT i'm sure we can find a workable solution for both problems ;) either by me giving you pointers to the code or since it seems to be good features add it myself :) depending on how specific your problemset or timeframe might be ..

thanks,
herbert

Just so happens I am setting up Mailman for someone today so was busy thinking about digests :)

Wouldn't it be easier to have a digest flag on SCT which users could select. Then at a point during the day all posts could be mailed out that have been created since the last cron job.

Iain.

Yes that's spot on, just what I'm after

Herbert Poul said @ 2009-02-27 01:57:34:

both should be doable.. if you would be willing to switch to SCT i'm sure we can find a workable solution for both problems ;) either by me giving you pointers to the code or since it seems to be good features add it myself :) depending on how specific your problemset or timeframe might be ..

Thanks for the prompt reply, it's good to see a project with active support.

I'll probably take you up on your offer. I can't do anything immediately as I'm quite busy at the moment. However I'll look to start something in a couple of weeks time. I've only just started with Django so I want to experiment with it a bit more, I'll definitely install SCT on my test machine to see how it fits together. Then I'm quite willing to have a go at implementing the new features myself, although I'd appreciate any guidance or help you are able to give.

Regards

Adrian