Watch content!

One of the new components introduced in GX WebManager 970 is the notification framework. Basically, this component makes it possible to receive alerts when a workflow state changes, an item is deleted, content expires or when content has not been changed for a number of days.

Watching content in GX WebManager

The most interesting feature of the notification framework is the ‘Watch this Item’ feature which allows editors to sign up for notifications of any updates related to Pages, Page Sections and Media Items. After signing up for a content item that you want to follow, you receive an e-mail notification in which a brief description is given about who did a modification when.

How does it work?

When selecting a Page in the Page tree, you can navigate to the accordion element “Watchers of this Page” below a Page. In this accordion element, you can see who the current watchers are for the particular Page and a button is shown which allows you to subscribe for the Page. When clicking on ‘Start watching’, you start watching the Page and from that moment on you are kept up-to-date with all changes made on that particular Page. To unsubscribe yourself from a particular content item, you can simply click on the button ‘Stop watching’. 

OK. Nice. But do I get an e-mail notification immediately after every save action? No. After modification it takes about 10 minutes before you receive an e-mail notification. When multiple changes are made by different persons within the same time range, just one e-mail notification is sent.  When you would like to have some detailed information about the modifications, I strongly recommend using the “Audit Trail” component. In short, the audit trail allows for viewing and comparing all modifications regarding Pages, Page Sections and Media Items.

More on Notifications

As the ‘Watch’ feature introduced in GX WebManager 970 is implemented for content lifecycle management in the editor environment, it can of course do a lot more for you. A pretty nice example can be found in the Community Forum WCB. The forum WCB includes a watch feature which allows forum users to keep themselves updated with the forum topic they created.  For this particular use case, the e-mail notification feature is implemented using the “QueryToSession” form handler.

Hopefully, we see in the future much more solutions using the Notifications Framework. So, just keep watching GX DeveloperWeb…