Notifications

[aleccool213]

As Max or Professor Sara, I want to receive notifications for my subscribed topics so that I don’t have to check for important updates all the time. [3] [A]

[ghost]

Email notifications have been implemented.

• Added support for gmail smtp email.
  • Account: messageboard.notifications@gmail.com
  • Password: teammates8
  • This means that registration emails and subscription notifications will actually be sent to the user's email address. Please be prepared for this, heh. Also note that phishing filters and junk filters really really don't like our emails, so check around.
  • Currently enabled on this branch by default - to disable, uncomment the following line in settings.py (its at the bottom):

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

• Support for a delay between email notifications
  • Default is currently 6 hours, defined in the default for notification_delay in UserProfile.
  • Currently no support for changing this from the user interface.
• Support for a notification queue
  • When the delay for sending notifications has not yet passed, the topic is instead added to a queue, and will be included in the next notification email instead.
• Emails are currently SYNCHRONOUS - there will be a slight delay between posting a message if a notification email is being sent out. Asynchronous tasks will probably require a third party package, so I'm going to leave it like this for now (maybe a good phase 3 task)

[ghost]

On further thought, it may be fairly easy to do asynchronous emailing by using some client-side AJAX, but I'm not sure I'd be able to handle a situation where a message fails to post for any reason.

Dunno if it would be valid or worth the time to do. Of someone thinks its important to do for this phase, let me know.

[ghost]

Hah, last minute realization: this will only work when posting a message on the actual topic page. I meant to add it to the table controller as well, but I completely forgot.

[ghost]

Added support for posting messages from the table view, now good to go for testing.

[ghost]

Appears to be working after testing.