Alerts

django-knowledge has built in functionality that sends email alerts to subscribed users when a new response is added or accepted. Users can opt-in or out this alert at the time of posting a question or response.

Further, Users with the flag ‘is_staff’ and the permission to change questions will receive updates when a new question is added.

TODO: They can also opt-in or out after the fact.

Enabling

By default, alerts are disabled. to enable them, simply add to your settings.py:

KNOWLEDGE_ALERTS = True

Also ensure that the Django site framework is installed and setup properly, otherwise the default links may not work properly.

SITE_ID = 1

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    'django.contrib.sites',
    # ...
)

Scheduling

By default, django-knowledge will greedily send emails via whatever email backend you have set during the request/response cycle. This is likely not desirable: we recommend using something like django-celery-email to delay the task via a queue. No further action is needed if you go this route.

Alternatively, you can specify your own email function where you can introduce your own off request functionality:

KNOWLEDGE_ALERTS_FUNCTION_PATH = 'path.to.your.own.function'

The email function should expect three keyword arguments:

• target_dict - A dictionary for {'me@dom.com‘: (‘First Last (or username)’, 'me@dom.com‘)} for anonymous or {'me@dom.com‘: <User instances>}. This list is deduplicated by email address. This list is generated by including all parties involved in a thread that had checked alert, or, by list of staff User models when a new question is added.
• response - A Response instance of the model triggering this alert. May be None. Only passed in when a new response is added.
• question - A Question instance of the model triggering this alert. May be None. Only passed in when a new question is added.
• **kwargs - It would be wise to include a blanket keyword arg catcher, we’ll likely add more things in the future, so this will keep your code from breaking.

Take a look at knowledge.signals.send_alerts for the original alert function to get an idea how it works.

Note: just to clarify: if you change the email function path setting, you will need to send the alert emails (or any other form of communication) yourself. Our builtin function will no longer act.

Templating

We offer three default templates used to render both the subject and message of alert emails:

• django_knowledge/emails/subject.txt
• django_knowledge/emails/message.txt
• django_knowledge/emails/message.html

Emails are sent with both txt and html formats. Simply override these if you want to modify the defaults.