[pmwiki-users] Integrating email & a (private) wikigroup

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:46:06AM -0500, Donald Z. Osborn wrote:
>    1) Setting up a private wikigroup is described at
>    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PrivateGroups . Is there any
>    complication between this and any of the below? ...

No complication.

>    2) There seem to be 3 ways of getting info about changes on a wiki or
>    wikigroup sent outside the wiki itself:
>    2a) RSS (we know about that in general; will an RSS feed work from a
>    private group?)

RSS feeds will work fine for groups, but with private groups there's
often a problem of handling authentication for the feed.  There isn't
a standard mechanism for dealing with password-protected RSS feeds.
So, the choice is to embed password information into the feed url,
or to allow the RSS feeds to be generated for the private group
even without a password.

>    2b) According to this page - http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Notify - a
>    feature can be added to enable email notification of page changes. If I
>    understand correctly, this could be set up for a specific wikigroup as
>    well as for the whole site. Privacy would be assured by putting only the
>    group members' emails or the group's private e-list in the notify address
>    list.

That's correct.  The NotifyList entry would look like:

    notify=elist at example.com group=PrivateGroup

The mailing address elist at example.com would receive periodic
notifications of any changes to pages in PrivateGroup.

>    2c) An alternative to the latter that generates email notification of
>    changes in particular pages is explained at
>    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/MailPosts

MailPosts is obsolete -- use Notify instead.

>    3) Is it possible to input content into a wikipage via email? Not sure
>    exactly what the users have in mind, so this is a general question about
>    whether anything of this sort is possible.

I'm working on this capability now.  It will require using an external
service on pmwiki.org, or setting up some additional software on the
mailhost.

Pm