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Merging the forums with the sdk-public mailing list

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Gaetano Giunta

Friday 23 July 2010 3:05:24 am

I have seen recently a surge in people double-posting help requests: once in the forums, once in the ez sdk-public mailing list.

I think it would be much simpler if there was an integration within the two, ie all messages posted to 'dev' forum get sent to ml and viceversa.

It not a novel idea - plenty of forums have allowed to do that for years - but I have not the slightest idea about the complexity of implementing this within share.ez.no...

Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board

Damien Pobel

Thursday 02 September 2010 3:17:21 pm

Hi Gaetano,

this would be a great feature !

Sending mails to sdk-public when a new message is posted should be quite simple with a custom workflow event type. The opposite seems more complicated. I see two possible solutions :

  1. a cronjob script can read the archive file of the mailing system and import messages
  2. a cronjob script can read emails on an account (imap or pop3) that is subscribed to the mailing and just import message from there

To work well, all users have to use a smart enough mail user agent to not break emails thread.

In addition, we have to answer to those two questions (and probably some others too ;)) :

  • what should we do if a user posts on the mail list with an email address that is not registered on the site ?
  • in which forum should we create a topic sent directly to the mailing list ?

We also have to deal with autoreply messages during holidays and there are probably a lots of problems I don't think of.

Cheers

Damien
Planet eZ Publish.fr : http://www.planet-ezpublish.fr
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Gaetano Giunta

Tuesday 07 September 2010 11:38:29 am

@Damien: ineteresting questions. Probably none of those unsolvable.

Getting mail off pop/imap should be a breeze using ezc.

Topics created by emails should be filed under the "general" (or maybe "develeoper") category (or instead we create a separate "SDK" forum).

Making sure that email threads are followed correctly might be harder. We'd need as well to clean up most of the quoted content in replies.

Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board