SID-02061: Enabling Review Date Notifications

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	6.0.1	Perl version:	Perl 5.10.1
Category:	MailerContrib	Server OS:	Oracle Linux 6	Last update:	10 years ago

I have been assigned the task of upgrading our current TWiki 5.1.1 environment to 6.0.1. I have a new server built and 6.0.1 installed, configured, and running properly. Data has been restored from our 5.1.1 installation with no problems.

Someone who has been using the system for a while said that in the past they would receive emails to notify them of the review dates of entries so that the data could be refreshed and updated. These are not being generated and I am not sure how to enable that.

I have read over the MailerContrib post several times and have tested the functionality of notifying when webs are changed successfully. However I am not able to enable notifications just to let the content creators know when it is time to review their work.

Could someone please point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

-- Todd Sherrer - 2015-05-06

Discussion and Answer

Hm... I don't know whether I understand the problem correctly. Where does the review date coming from? As far as I know, MailerContrib is only triggered by changes, and not by dates swooshing by.

Is there a chance that the review date notifications of 5.1.1 were not sent by MailerContrib, but by another non-default plugin which you just need to install / enable in your new installation? ActionTrackerPlugin comes into my mind, but there may be others providing such a feature as well. To check, compare the topic TWiki.InstalledPlugins for both 5.1.1 and 6.0.1.

-- Harald Jörg - 2015-05-06

Thanks for the reply. I am sorry that I should have included more information with this original request. I was in a bit of a rush when I submitted this yesterday. I am in a common situation where the original installer for our 5.1.1 environment is no longer with our group and I have been tasked as the 'new guy' to upgrade the system.

Before installing 6.0.1 and migrating data, I did compare the plugins lists and the 5.1.1 and 6.0.1 installations matched with what is installed.

We have a 'KBase' web where we can search knowledgebase articles that we submit. In each KBase article at the bottom, there is a table with specific fields such as 'Title', 'Owner', 'ReviewDate', etc. These are automatically populated when an article is saved. Somehow in the past there was a mechanism that looked at the review date and if it was past a certain time (6 months in the past for example), an email would be sent to the owner of the article to remind them to review the content. I have found nothing in the 5.1.1 installation that would lead me to how this was accomplished.

I did review all extensions this morning and one that may be close is the 'SendMailPlugin' to send emails based on actions, but it is not installed in 5.1.1. That is the only option that I can see that might give us the functionality again. Any other suggestions would be appreciated and I will try to see if this extension will work.

Todd

-- Todd Sherrer - 2015-05-07

Harald, I just found someone with a bit of knowledge from our old TWiki system. Apparently the functionality I am describing was a custom script for notifications. After some searching we found a copy of the notification script on a very old server and hope to have this working again. I do appreciate the help and sorry for the inconvenience about custom work.

Todd

-- Todd Sherrer - 2015-05-07

That is what I suspected after reading your reply. Check the cron job on the old server to learn how the script is called.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2015-05-07

Just a final follow-up as I finally found out all of the details yesterday. Originally there was a TWiki 4.x server that was upgraded to 5.1.1 for our main IT group. During that upgrade, the custom Perl script that was used for notifications was not migrated over to the new server. Thus the notification functionality stopped and no one knew why. Yesterday I discovered that we had yet another TWiki 4.x server running for a different department that had this script still in place. So I now have a copy of this and will try to update it to get it working on our 6.0.1 system.

-- Todd Sherrer - 2015-05-08

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.