I would love to get some feedback on new developments for Fox and FoxNotify regards ability to send out emails to lists of recipients.
Up till now after installing FoxNotify one could add to a Fox form a foxfilter 'FoxNotify', which made the form, after successful posting, send out an email to one or several lists of recipients on notify list pages in a special 'FoxNotifyLists' group (the group could be customised). A input control named 'foxnotify' could specify which list page to use, but it had to be in the FoxNotifyLists group. Now I added a foxaction 'mail' and markup (:foxmail ..:) which similar to fox markup (:foxreplace ...:) (:foxadd ...:) (:foxptv ...:) can take a template and target parameter. The template in this case is used to format the email, and the target is used to specify a notify list page. This new markup makes it possible to use Fox for mailing an email to a specified group of recipients, and it is not necessary that Fox has to do a successful posting for this email to be sent. Thereby one can built Mail Forms (Contact Forms) or use it to issue newsletters to a group of subscribers (as long as there are not too many, since the mailing is done by the php mail function). Today I widened the possibilities by making it possible to issue HTML formatted emails. The email template accepts wiki markup, the body of the email will be marked up to HTML, and the email header will get appropriate code to mark the email message as HTML formatted. A variable has to be set in config.php to enable this behaviour. I also integrated FoxNotify and Fox code further, so that it is no longer necessary to set a foxfilter FoxNotify. It is sufficient to set a notify list page with a foxnotify input control. These changes of today have not yet been released. I am wondering if it is a good idea to keep a FoxNotifyLists group, and if the (:foxmail ..:) markup should be restricted to use only email target lists from that group, or if target lists could be anywhere (like other target pages). 'mail' has to be enabled as foxaction for such pages (like 'add' or 'replace' for other target pages, as specified with $FoxPagePermissions. My original idea about the FoxNotifyLists group was that it is easier to protect pages with email addresses if they are in one specific group. Also FoxNotify worked without any extra FoxPagePermission setting. Have you got any comments on such security questions? And are there specific security concerns to be addressed by allowing HTML formatted email messages? Note the formatting is done via wiki markup in the template page, not by inserting HTML tags into the template. At the same time it will be possible to use wiki markup for instance in a text box of a Mail Form, if HTML emails are enabled. Quite good looking formatted newsletters, including images and links etc., can be mailed this way as well. Please give me you ideas on these issues, so I can finalise the next release of fox and FoxNotify. Thank you! ~Hans _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
