[Pmwiki-users] RSS from Wiki or email notifications?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 08:16:55AM -0800, Noel Llopis wrote:
> One of the features I'm looking for in a Wiki is the ability to easily 
> notify people when certain pages change (and they choose to "subscribe" to 
> those specific changes).
> 
> One way would be if the Wiki generated an RSS feed, so people could see at a 
> glance what changed. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to create from a 
> RecentChanges page. Is there anything like that already? If not, I might 
> create one.

This already exists -- PmWiki includes the ability to generate RSS feeds
from any arbitrary list of pages.  Just create a page containing a WikiTrail
of the pages you're interested in for the feed, then add ?action=rss
to the end of that page's url.  For example, if I place the following
trail on my profiles page (Profiles.Pm):

    * Cookbook.Cookbook
    * Main.HomePage
    * PmWiki.PmWiki
    * PITS.RecentChanges

then I can get an RSS feed of those pages by using
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Profiles/Pm?action=rss .

> Alternatively, I'd like people to be able to subscribe themselves to 
> specific pages, and get email whenever any changes happen. Is that possible 
> with PmWiki?

This is PITS 00291 (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00291).
The big problem with this is in verifying the recipient email addresses;
we don't want malicious people to be able to (1) subscribe email addresses
that they don't own (i.e., subscribe others to the page), or (2) harvest 
the email addresses for inclusion on spam lists.

Pm