edem.group.messages.topicsdigest

E-Democracy Customization of GroupServer's Topics Digest

The styling borrows a little bit from https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints/blob/master/templates/mobile-basicmobile.html. Thanks Mail Chimp!

Mockups

HTML and text mockups can be found in docs/mockups. Unfortunately, the final look and markup differs a fair amount from the mockups.

ZMI Files and Properties

The digests requires two files to exist in a group's context:

• digest_news.xml
• digest_news.txt

These allow a site administrator to edit the content of the E-Democracy News section of the digests.

The digests also makes use of one property in a group's context - digest_news_title - to set the title for the News section of the digest. However, this property is not required, and the egg will use the default name 'E-Democracy News' if this property does not exist.

To be available for all group digests, these files and properties should be placed in a site folder. While this has not been verified, it should be possible to overwrite the values of these files and properties for specific groups.

Digest Pages

The following pages are overridden by this egg:

• Daily Digests
  • gs-group-messages-topicsdigest-daily.html
  • gs-group-messages-topicsdigest-daily.txt
• Reminder Digests
  • gs-group-messages-topicsdigest-weekly.html
  • gs-group-messages-topicsdigest-weekly.txt

In the case of html pages, the templates (dailyTopicsDigest-* and weeklyTopicsDigest-*) are where the embedded CSS for the digest is defined, including the responsive design CSS. Aside from this, not much else of interest happens in the digest page templates.

Digest Viewlets

The Daily HTML digest use 5 viewlets:

• A header viewlet that displays the group name, membership size, and social media links
• A list viewlet that displays the list of active topics
• A news viewlet that displays organizational news from E-Democracy
• A clips viewlet that displays clips from active topics
• A footer viewlet that displays standard help/footer text

The Reminder HTML Digest uses a similar set of viewlets, but does not use a clips viewlet.

Reminder Digests Differences

The Weekly Digest of gs.group.messages.topicsdigest has been renamed slightly to be the Reminder Digest. While the reminder digest is still accessed via gs-group-messages-topicsdigest-weekly.html/txt, all associated templates, classes, viewlets, and viewlet managers use the term Reminder instead of Weekly.

In addition, the Reminder Digest goes out 30 days after the last post to a group instead of 7 days.

Finally, while the Reminder digest is based on E-Democracy';s Daily Digest , it does not include the clips section.

Text Digest Differences

This egg mostly reuses the text digests that are defined by gs.group.messages.topicsdigest. The one significant difference is that a News viewlet is inserted by this egg.

Tracking Parameter

All links from the HTML topicsdigests to forums.e-democracy.org include a parameter used to track how much traffic arrives at forums.e-democracy.org via the topicsdigests. This parameter - rb (for 'Referred By') - will always be set to a value starting with 'topicsdigest'. The value will usually include '-daily' or '-reminder'.

The rb parameter is also appended to the E-Democracy logo URL. In this case, rb is set using the format 'topicsdigest-<groupID>-YYYY-MM-DD'. Using this format, a search can be done on the access logs of e-democracy.org to see roughly how many topicsdigest emails are opened per group per day (assuming email clients load images).