[ckan-dev] RFC: Activity streams on-site and email notifications

Mon Oct 22 14:29:03 UTC 2012

We have two tickets for pdeu, to implement on-site notification of new
activity in your activity stream (i.e. a number in the corner of the
site that tells you how many new activities you have) and to implement
email notifications of new activities.

I plan to start implementing these soon and I've put some implementation
notes here:

https://github.com/okfn/ckan/wiki/Spec:-Activity-Stream-Notifications

Comments welcome.

For the on-site notification, we need to add the concept of "seen" and
"unseen" activities to the model on a per-user basis. My idea is to add
a datetime column to the user table which records the last time they saw
their activity stream, and count any activities newer than that as
unseen.

For the email notification the plan is to add an "unsent notifications"
table to the database and add a notifier job that runs periodically and
consumes rows from this table, sending them as emails (this is from an
older spec for the same feature).