What's New change to use notifications?

Development
1

Hello devs,

I don’t recall if we discussed using XWiki notifications for the What’s New feature (I don’t see it mentioned in UC1 at UC1 at https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/WhatsNewFeature ). It seems it could be an interesting idea for several reasons:

  • Single place for all notifications
  • Ability to opt-in/opt-out in the user profile
  • No need to develop a new UI
    • Actually this is maybe not fully true. I guess it depends if we can keep being terse and have only a few lines. I think it would work for what we have ATM. However, not sure how it would work if we add images. Any idea?
  • Ability to receive what’s new news by email

Or maybe we need both, with a link in the notifications to the What’s New UI, so that users who want to be notified, can be notified.

WDYT?

Thanks

1 Like
2

It could be interesting to have notifications. The display of those has to be discussed: for email it’s probably ok as we can take the place we want. For the notification area I’m not sure putting an image would be good, but could be only a line with a link to go to the actual news.

Now, you have to consider a few thing:

  1. since it’s not a notification linked to a page of the wiki you will have to use a targetable event, and so to decide who can receive those: could be the admin group, or the all users group, or a configurable group for example.
  2. since XWiki 15.5 and the change on watch, by default all new notification type is watched: meaning that if you trigger a targetable event with a new type for all users, everyone will receive the notification. They can always then decide to stop watching those, of course.
3

I’m exploring the What’s New to notify of new features / changes in our instance upon update (see "What's new" feature feedback request - #10 by watery) and since we move from LTS to LTS, this is going to show one message per year.

Our instance is used inside our company, by few users.

For me:

  1. it’s enough to have an hint inside the Wiki (no need for emails or anything else)
  2. an icon similar to the bell for page edits would be good, but it must be a separate icon, so notifications about news aren’t diluted between notifications of page changes
4

The notification would be about “what’ new” news, so anytime there’s a new news, a notification would be sent.

The notifications system of XWiki is not just for wiki page changes. It’s generic and for any type of change. I think what you’re asking for is the ability to filter notifications. This is planned as part of the notification inbox feature, see Notification Inbox.