Subscription management
Overview
Silva has a finely grained subscription feature. Visitors can subscribe and receive email notification when a part or parts of the site are updated. The Silva Manager enables the subscription feature for the whole site. Editors activate this subscription function for some or all of the content they have Editor privileges for. Subscriptions can be enabled on Silva Documents and as well Silva Containers.
Activating subscriptions from Silva
An Editor can enable the subscription feature for a particular subtree or individual document from the Silva management area.
Go to the area of the site where you’d like to activate the subscriptions feature.
Click on the properties tab and then click the subscriptions... button. (Fig. 1.) (This button won’t be visible if your manager hasn’t enabled subscriptions in the site.)
Fig. 1. Clicking the subscriptions button.
The Editor can choose to enable or disable the subscriptions feature for a document or folder or publication, or decide to let the setting be acquired from its parent (this is the default).
The Silva root has the subscription feature set to "Off" by default. In other words, even if the Manager enables the feature, no content can be subscribed to until it is activated by the Editor. To activate subscriptions select the radio button next to Enable subscriptions option and click the save changes button. (Fig. 2.)
Fig. 2. Subscriptions settings.
Managing subscribers
You can manually add subscribers in the textarea “subscribed email addresses”, multiple email addresses are separated by a new line. To add an email address just add the email address after a new line, to remove just select the email address and press backspace. Click the save changes button to confirm the changes. (Fig. 3.)
Fig. 3. Manage subscribers.
Creating navigational links to the subscription UI for visitors
A “subscribe to this page” link must added by the Manager or template designer. The link should be added in the layout template of the public website (see the Site design and templates documentation). The URL to the subscription UI is the URL for the content object with "/subscriptions.html" appended to it. When visiting the link you will be presented with a form to subscribe with your email address. (Fig. 4.)
Fig. 4. The subscriptions subscribe form.
E.g. for the document you’re reading, the link would be:
http://.../subscription_docs/subscriptions.html
How site visitors use the subscription feature
Overview
Silva documents
Once subscribed to a document, a visitor will receive a message whenever a document is updated and published. This email will contain a link to the document, as well as a link to the subscription form for unsubscribing.
Silva containers
Visitors can also subscribe to Silva Folders and Publications. This means they’ll be notified about all changes of content contained in these areas. In other words, visitors can subscribe to a complete subtree of the content. This could result in a lot of mail in the visitor’s inbox. If you have the Silva Forum extension installed you can also enable subscriptions on the forum to make it possible to subscribe to Topics and follow the activity on a specific topic.
Subscribing
For a visitors to be able to subscribe to part of a site, they need to click on a “subscribe to this page” link, which is created as described in the section Creating navigational links to the subscription UI for visitors.
The Subscription service will then send an email confirmation message to the email address supplied. This message contains a link (Fig. 5.) that, if opened in a web browser will confirm the subscription. (Fig. 6.)
Fig. 5. Email confirmation link.
Fig. 6. Subscription confirmation.
Once subscribed a visitor will receive a message whenever the document or container content is updated and published. This email will contain a link to the document, as well as a link to the subscription form for unsubscribing.
Unsubscribing
Cancelling a subscription follows a similar pattern: the visitor has to click the unsubscribe button in the subscription user interface. (Fig. 7.) The confirmation email message will contain a link that, if followed, will cancel the subscription.
Fig. 7. Unsubscribe form.
See also:
Subscription configuration for Silva managers.