Dan

About me: Founder and techinical creative at Believe Collective
Location:
Email: dan@believecollective.net

Send private message

You must be logged in to send a private message.

Friends

No friends yet.

Activity

  • Dan commented on the plugin Group Listserve
    There probably is but there is no more development on this plugin scheduled in the near future! Please feel free to give it a go! Else a dedicated space is needed. Bug noted.
  • Dan commented on the plugin Group Listserve
    Have you checked the readme for instructions? The plugin has not been tested with any other email hosts than our own, which we have full control over. Is the domain that elgg is installed upon the same domain as your email address? The plugin will...
  • Dan commented on the plugin Group Listserve
    There is a readme in the package which you should open with any text file reader, notepad, preview, etc. In it there are detailed instructions on how to get the plugin working. It sounds like you have not set up the plugin correctly. Apologies, the...
  • Dan commented on the plugin Group Listserve
    I'm not sure I've not tested the plugin you link to. This plug allows topic comments to be emailed to group members with the topic name as the subject and the group name as the email. As long a the mail server is set up to all unknown emails to pass...
  • Dan uploaded a new plugin: Group Listserve
    • Hi Vantel, I did not get that error I use 1.6.1... it all worked smoothly, but I still can not get the from address to match my domain (it goes from my server address)... perhaps removing that "Net" bit will help me? I guess I'll try it... thanks.

    • Hi Dan, hi all,

      Firstly, thanks a lot for posting this module.  I am sure it must have taken a lot of effort.  I don't know if anyone is using it yet but I thought that I would share some experiences.  Unlike probably a chunk of this community I am being paid to write code for an Elgg-based system so (with Dan's blessing) maybe I can help get some more tweaks/fixes done to this module (providing it fits in with what we are doing in our project).

      Anyway, I have only been working this this module for half a day so my understanding is still rudamentary (and I am new to Elgg), so please correct me if I am wrong, but here are some things I found along the way

      1)  topic.php (function add_topic) seems to have a bug in it.  The message (the body of the email) never gets added to the group post.  The consequence of this is that new topics have a subject, but no body.  The fix to this is to add this code at line 47 (or around there)

      $grouptopic->description = $message;

      2) This module seems to support plain text emails just fine, but does not seem to like multi-part (i don't know about html only, maybe they are fine too).  multi-part emails end up as posts that have a lot of spurious header-type information in them.  we have a community of Outlook users so i am going to have to try to figure out how to address that.

      3) I don't have a clear idea of the usage pattern of this module yet.  If i email into the system and it creates a new topic, another user should get sent an email with the message in. if they reply to that email then it should posted as a comment.  i don't know if this is how it works for everyone else, we are working off a customized version of Elgg, but it does not seem to for us.  the notification email sent by the system would need to have the group name in the email address.  ours does not currently, but maybe that is our problem! :-)

      4)  This could be my lack of understand of PHP config, but I had to tweak the code to get this module working.  In mail.php the call to handle_messages (line 167) threw an exception because $tags was not set.  I was not sure how the tags there related to the tags potentially stored in the $message_info.  I was not too worried about tagging today, so I just set a $tags variable to blank and it allows me to proceed.  The same is true if the call to add_topic (where $message_info['tags'] is not a valid array entry)

      5)  The module might be improved somewhat by some handling of outlier cases.  At the moment if the email cannot be processed it gets deleted anyway.  This might be necessary with a pop3 mailbox, but it might be hard to troubleshoot issues in a production system like this.

      6)  I had to debug the code to find out what format the subject line had to be in.  As far as I can make out the subject line needs to end in [my topic name goes here] (including the brackets).  I imagine the brackets are to delimit the text so that "RE:" (or whatever) does not get in the way.  

      Thanks again,

      Andy

    • hi there,

      has anyone managed to get this module working successfully yet?  it seems like the fact that the framework does not pass through the actual comment being posted there are some workarounds with globals that (for me at least) are causing some issues.  one thing i am interested in - if a comment is added by the non-group/topic owner do correct emails get sent out?

       

      cheers,andy

  • Dan has updated their profile
  • Dan has a new avatar
    Dan
  • Dan has updated their profile