collective.watcherlist is a package that enables you to keep a list of people who want to receive emails when an item gets updated. The main use case is something like Products.Poi_, which is an issue tracker for Plone. That product lets you create an issue tracker. In this tracker people can add issues. The tracker has managers. Everytime a new issue is posted, the managers should receive an email. When a manager responds to an issue, the original poster (and the other managers) should get an email. Anyone interested in following the issue, should be able to add themselves to the list of people who get an email. The functionality for this was in Poi, but has now been factored out into this collective.watcherlist package.

This is not a package for end users. Out of the box it does nothing. It is a package for integrators or developers. You need to write some python and zcml in your own package (like Poi now does) to hook collective.watcherlist up in your code.

We gladly use the ZCA (Zope Component Architecture) to allow others to register their own adapters and own email texts, so outside of Zope the package does not make much sense. And we import some code from Plone too, so you will need that. If you want to use it in bare Zope or CMF, contact me: we can probably do some conditional imports instead.

collective.watcherlist might also be usable as a basis for a newsletter product. If you feel `Singing and Dancing`_ is overkill for you, or too hard to adapt to your specific needs, you could try writing some code around collective.watcherlist instead.

In its simplest form, the integration that is needed, is this:

• Register an adapter from your content type to collective.watcherlist.interfaces.IWatcherList. In a lot of cases using the default implementation as factory for this adapter is fine: collective.watcherlist.watchers.WatcherList
• Create an html form where people can add themselves to the watcher list. This could also be PloneFormGen_ form with a custom script adapter as action.
• Register a BrowserView for your content type, inheriting from collective.watcherlist.browser.BaseMail and override its properties subject, plain and/or html.
• Create an event handler or some other code that gets the adapter for your content type and uses that to send an email with the subject and contents defined in the browser view you created.

This addons play well with zope's event and plone's contentrules. It triggers a zope event on all basic actions done on the watcherlist:

• ToggleWatchingEvent
• RemovedFromWatchingEvent
• AddedToWatchingEvent

Those events are registred to be useable as content rule trigger so you can create a rule based on it.

It also provides a content rule action so you can create an action that's add or remove the current user to or from the watcherlist attached to the context.

• Maurits van Rees [maurits] <maurits@vanrees.org> author
• Gagaro <gagaro42@gmail.com>
• JeanMichel FRANCOIS aka toutpt <toutpt@gmail.com>

• Zest Software http://zestsoftware.nl/
• Makina Corpus