Wiki Newsletter

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Summary

A WikiNewsletter is a list of topics and a list of people who are interested in them. On a regular basis, the topics are scanned for changes and if there are changes, notification of those changes is sent to the list of subscribers.

To create a WikiNewsletter:

• Choose a TopicName for the name of your WikiNewsletter; by convention these names usually end with Newsletter (e.g., MetaWikiNewsletter)
• Create a topic page for your newsletter
• Add a property called Description that says what your newsletter is about
• Add a property called Topics with a comma-separated list of topics
• Add a property called Subscribers with a comma-separated list of subscriber email addresses
• Edit the WikiNewsletterIndex (see instructions below) topic and add the name of your newsletter to the Newsletters property

Editing your WikiNewsletterIndex

Each TopicNamespace has its own WikiNewsletterIndex. When you edit yours, you need to be sure you are this for your the namespace. For example, there's one here (WikiNewsletterIndex) that probably isn't where you want to put your newsletter -- unless it's about FlexWiki.

To edit your newsletter index, go back to the HomePage of your namespace and edit the WikiNewsletterIndex there!

Overview

A WikiNewsletter is a list of topics and a list of people who are interested in them. On a regular basi s, the topics are scanned for changes and if there are changes, notification of those changes is sent to the list of subscribers by email.

Subscribing to a newsletter

The list of subscribers for a newletter is stored in Subscribers property of the topic that defines the newsletter. So, if there's a newsletter called RainbowNewsletter, on that page you should find a Subscribers property that contains a list of email addresses, separated by commas. Just add yourself to the list.

Note that the Subscribers property might be a hidden property that you can only see when you edit the topic.

Finding newsletters to subscribe to

To see the list of newsletters for a FlexWiki site, follow the Subscriptions link in the menu. For this site (flexwiki.com), you can find this at: http://www.flexwiki.com/rssface.aspx

RSS feeds for newsletters

The contents of each newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. If you prefer to watch changes on the site using an RSSAggregator, you might prefer to point your aggregator at some newsletter RSS feeds instead of subscribing by email to a newsletter.

To see the list of RSS feeds for a FlexWiki site, follow the Subscriptions link in the menu. For this site (flexwiki.com), you can find this at: http://www.flexwiki.com/rssface.aspx

Creating a new newsletter

To create a WikiNewsletter:

• Create a topic that describes the newsletter
• Add this topic to the WikiNewsletterIndex

Create the newsletter topic

First, create a topic describing the newsletter

• Choose a TopicName for the name of your WikiNewsletter; by convention these names usually end with Newsletter (e.g., MetaWikiNewsletter)
• Create a topic page for your newsletter
• Add a property called Description that says what your newsletter is about
• Add a property called Topics with a comma-separated list of topics, or "*" (no quotes) to include all topics
• (Optionally) add a property called Exclude with a common-separated list of topics not to include. This works best when combined with a wildcard ( * ) in the Topics property.
• Add a property called Subscribers with a comma-separated list of subscriber email addresses

Editing your WikiNewsletterIndex

Once you have created a topic for your newsletter, add it to the WikiNewsletterIndex topic. This is a list of all the newsletter topics for a namespace. Go to the WikiNewsletterIndex topic and there is a Newsletters property. This is a comma-seperated list of newsletter topics. Add the name of your newsletter topic (created above) to this list.

If your FlexWiki only has one namespace, you'll only have one WikiNewsletterIndex topic. If you have multiple namespaces, you'll want to understand that each TopicNamespace has its own WikiNewsletterIndex. When you edit yours, you need to be sure you are doing this for your the namespace (in other words, the one in the same namespace as the newsletter topic).

Discussion

* Q Is there a way to enable TLS support (gmail accounts use it for SMTP) for the emails? Alternatively, is there a free email account service that works? -- Ric

* Q I don't get any newsletters by email at all, I think my subscription topics are set up correctly, and the SMTPServer in the Web.config is set. But the Newsletter Daemon Status page in the admin folder says Work Underway: False, and all the other statuses are "[never]". Any clues how to troubleshoot? -- Thanks, MurrayRoke

* Q I am not quite sure where I need to add the TopicName for my WikiNewsletter. I tried addeding a page called MetaWikiNewletter, but nothing seems to be happeing. Do I need to add something to the _contentbasedefinition.wiki? Perhaps an example for a namespace called Mysample? -- Thanks, René de Vries

* A Make sure you have have a topic called WikiNewsletterIndex on your site; create it if you don't. You add each of your newsletters to this page. You can see how this works on this site by looking at WikiNewsletterIndex; just don't change it please. -- DavidOrnstein

• a Got it to work thanks - it is even easier then I thought! -- Ren√©

* Q Is there a way to change the layout / content of the newsletter? -- René

• A No. The formatting is pretty much hard-coded in the engine. -- DavidOrnstein

* Q In the Summary it says 'on a regular basis, the topics are scanned...' What is a regular basis? Ones per hour, once per day? and what does UpdateFrequency got to do with it? -- IvoDiepstraten

• A In the current build, topics are scanned every ten seconds. UpdateFrequency does not affect this. Rather, UpdateFrequency is the minimum amount of time in minutes that is allowed to pass between mailings. For instance, if this value is set to 60, and changes are made to the wiki every five minutes, you will still receive only one email every hour, with all the changes for that hour. If there are no changes, no email is sent.

* Q In WebConfiguration it says that 'If you want your system to deliver email WikiNewsletter you need to set up to four options in the web.config'. But in ReleaseNotes1515 it says that a NewsletterDaemon and SMTPMail is included in the build. Do I still need to specify the SMTP server, or can I use the NewsletterDaemon? -- IvoDiepstraten

• Any info on the NewsletterDaemon / SMTPMail features of 1515 would be appreciated... -- Don Alvarez

A The NewsletterDaemon is the bit that watches for changes in the wiki, and SMTPMail is the SMTP client* code. You still need to specify the SMTP server that will actually route the mail. -- CraigAndera [2004-07-30]

* Q I notice your HourlyChangesNewsletter has an Excludes: property. I've tried to use this to exclude the test page on my own site, but to no avail. Does this work in the binary release, or do I need to grab some extra source? -- Paul Bartlett

A I wrote this feature - it should work. It was added in release 1515. However, the property name is "Exclude" not "Excludes". Since I can never remember which way it goes either, I've gone ahead and created a patch that respects either name. I'll integrate it when the source goes live again. Sound good? -- CraigAndera [2004-07-28]

* Q Can you use WikiTalk to generate your list of topics for a newsletter? Due to the number of changes being made to our site and people not adding their new topics to the newsletter page, things are getting missed. I wondered if you could generate the topics list by setting a particular property on a page and then having the newsletter topics list generated by looking for topics with that property. Thanks. -- LoriM [7/30/2004]

* A Not currently. However, you can include the topic * and then use an Exclude property to list pages you don't want to appear in the newsletter. -- CraigAndera [2004-07-30]

* Q I have created a newsletter page for my default namespace MyWiki in my machine by refering to the above instructions.

However, when I tried to click on RSS icon near the newsletter link in the subscription page, it return an exception of System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.

The version I am using is 1.8.0.1687 (binaries). -- Frankie Leung

* A I think I have a workaround for this. in BasePage.cs, replace the contents of the RootUrl() method like so:

        protected string RootUrl(HttpRequest req)
        {
                return FullRootUrl(req);
        }

It seems that BasePage.cs rev 1.10 introduced this error by changing the semantics of RootUrl() function, to address Bug 1039466 I have posted this to the user list for feedback. This issue is tracked at Bug 1276492 -- JimmySieben [2005-08-30]

About the newsletters feature being broken

Note

WikiNewsletters were broken for a number of released from about build 1610 on but are now fixed again as of build 1627 (December 2004). See NewslettersAreFixed.

* Q Has anyone got a Topics:* newsletter to work? Whenever I subscribe to a newsletter for all topics on my own site, I get an Email generated every 10 seconds ad-infinitum (even after putting in Exclude:_NewsletterHistory, to stop it picking up on its own changes). Cheers. -- ChrisLacey [2004-10-12]

* A- Fixed as of 1627

* Q I'm having the same problem as ChrisLacey (except with ALL newsletters, not just the asterisked ones). After setting up a newsletter and making a change to one of the pages, I get a separate email every ten seconds, sent out in one minute intervals (UpdateFrequency was initially set to 1, but later I changed it to 3, 5, 10, 30, and 300 - didn't matter). It never stops! Six emails a minute, every minute. I finally turned Newsletters off because I couldn't find anyway to make them work properly. -- ScottRansom [2004-OCT-14]

* A- Fixed as of 1627

• Ditto on the above. Did the install, followed the config. The first e-mail went off without a hitch, then no further e-mails came, despite making changes. Added the UpdateFrequency item (which did not exist previously), then about an hour later started getting e-mails every ten seconds. Also turned newsletters off. Also, RSS feed did not seem to ever work in any of the above cases. Hope that helps with troubleshooting -- GarthHoward [2004-DEC-1]

* A- Fixed as of 1627

* A I was in the same boat. Did a little trolling through DeveloperHome and the SourceForge site; looks like this issue has been identified (it's a file cache coherence problem) and, it seems, fixed, but the fix has not yet been integrated into the build. CraigAndera and DavidOrnstein are on it. Also see WhoIsWorkingOnWhat. -- StuartMacleod [2004-12-05]

* A- Fixed as of 1627

* Q I'm having trouble with getting a newsletter on my site to publish. I was able to recieve an initial email, but subsequent changes to the newsletter itself OR to its topics do not cause the Newsletter Daemon to send out email notifications. -- Grant Steinfeld [2005-FEB-25]

* Q My Newsletter has been running for two months and is 22MB!! Can I safely delete the log?

* A You can if you don't care for it. I keep deleting mine. This brings me to the next question:

* Q Is there any setting or planned feature to keep the daemon log file under a specified maximum size? Or at least having a Clear Log button on the daemon page would be handy.