Improve watchlist notifications

Which version of Mahara are you using?

Version 1.5.2

I could confirm this on http://demo.mahara.org and as far as I could tell you get two notifications: 1 when you click the "Configure" button and the 2nd when you click on "Done".

Cannot confirm this.

Only one notification is sent when clicking on the "Configure" button.
No notification is sent when you click on the "Done" button.

I suggest to send only one notification when the "Done" button is clicked.
A notification when you click on the configure button altough no change occurred is an error from my point of view.

I agree with you that a notification should only be sent once" because otherwise you could potentially get a lot of notifications for the same page. That would be alright if the notification specified what you had changed. But as that is not the case, one notification should be enough.

The only reason I can think of why the notifications are sent upon modifying a block is that not all users may click on "Done" as it is not really necessary to save your content. Thus, if the notification is only sent on "Done", but a user doesn't click it, your watchlist isn't updated.

You could rename "Done" for example to "Send notification" so the user knows what the button is for.

It's not that easy as you don't know if someone has your page on their watchlist and its not just the button for notifications. I might be wrong in my assessment that you usually don't have to save your page by clicking on "Done", but there might be something else that the button does. A dev might know more.

Further I think if the button is called "Send notification", some users may not click it in order not to let others know that they have changed something. I would do that in some cases in order to see if all is correct first and then when you wanted to click "Send notification" a second time there wouldn't be anything to notify about.

Tobias provides an improved watchlist notification feature that is discussed at https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5652

Tobias, if someone opened artefact, but did not do any changes to it, and clicked save. I guess the notification will be triggered anyway or not?

Hi Ruslan. The plugin hooks into the blockinstancecommit-event and that is triggered whenever the savebutton is pressed. So yes, the notification will be triggered even if nothing was changed.

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/2491
Committed: http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/6fe99d5f54db6dcd91ec9852a221d54d4edcd21a
Submitter: Robert Lyon (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit 6fe99d5f54db6dcd91ec9852a221d54d4edcd21a
Author: Tobias Zeuch <email address hidden>
Date: Wed Sep 11 15:51:25 2013 +0200

New watchlistnotification Plugin (Bug 1041228)

Introducing a new plugin watchlistnotification that responds to the
events saveartefact, blockinstancecommit and deleteblockinstance. It
stores the changed view and the blockinstance in a table watchlist_queue
and checks via cron if there were any changes on a view and if for that
view the last change has happened some time ago (the minutes are stored
in config under watchlistnotification_delay, the default is 20min).

If so, a message is generated that informs the watchlist recipient about
which view and which block-instances on this view have been touched
(added or changed).

As there is no way to disable the built-in/old watchlist-notification-
system, this is disabled in the mahara-core code, that is,
artefact/lib.php and lib/view.php

Change-Id: I039c5285cdd1b09ed9eb38a647e0c1510c3cabb9
Signed-off-by: Tobias Zeuch <email address hidden>