[pmwiki-users] RFC -- POP3 to PmWiki

[Ben Wilson]

On 10/4/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> One interesting approach that could make things "push based"
> might be for pmwiki.org (and/or others) to offer a generic
> mail-to-wiki gateway service for PmWiki sites.  Such a service
> would scan incoming mail for wiki posts, and then use standard
> HTTP calls to post the content to the appropriate wikis.

I have Pywe that allows CLI editing of remote pages locally by
mimicing browser behavior. It's also designed to take local text file
and post. So, it would easily be recruited for the task.

Subject = SiteName:Group.PageName (e.g. pmwiki.org:Magazine.SuperFlyArticle).

Again, the email-from address would be compared to a table of
authorized users for the given target site. This mitigates having to
have a specific email address for each site on the gateway server.

The gateway poster would have a specific user name (e.g. PmWikiMailer)
and password for a given site. When posting, this user would be used.
If a sudden problem occurs with the gateway, then changing that one
user's permission protects the site. It also provides notice of pages
posted by the gateway.

Alternately, it would still use its username/password, but explicitly
set the Author based on the inbound email address. It would add a
category or other tag that can be searched for to show mail-posted
pages.

I could give this service a go when I return to the land of the
living---which will be in about 77 days. Depending on how my paper on
capital punishment goes, I could start on this sooner.

> Something that I have found that works very nicely is to have things happen
> at the *end* of page processing by using PHP's 'register_shutdown_function'.
>
> For example, when PmWiki detects that it needs to update the page index
> (which can take quite a while), it does so *after* processing the request
> and sending the results back to the browser.  The same thing is true
> with the notify list, where there can be a lot of email messages that
> need to be sent; PmWiki simply performs the processing "in the
> background" after it has completed handling a browser's request.

Slick.

-- 
Ben Wilson