Notify when a meeting is deleted or unpublished

[CheriJones]

Contact Details

cherijones@cyberservices.com

Website With Issue

https://kc-aa.org

What happened?

no notification when a meeting is closed

TSML Version

Latest (default)

Wordpress Version

Other (Identify version in text above)

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Firefox

Relevant log output/errors

unknown

[CheriJones]

testing change notifications and emails are not being sent - is there something else we should do

[joshreisner]

@CheriJones this all looks correct! It's just not a feature we currently have. Does seem like an oversight. I don't recall it coming up before though.

[CheriJones]

we are trying to cross notify between Area 39 and the central offices in our area so that everything is up to date and identical in step 1 of solving duplicate and incorrect listings - but we can't get the plugin to send notifications even for basic changes - are there instructions anywhere - question came up about how the plugin sends the email notification - is it within the TSML or is there another plugin needed

[brianw-area24]

As I think more about this, it's not a very straight forward issue within TSML. The problem I see comes around the importing of feeds and/or CSV files. When you do this, it deletes the existing meetings, then creates new ones for all of the meetings in the import. Therefore, we can't just send a message when a meeting is deleted.

I do have an idea which I think would have the desired outcome, which is know when a meeting changes on another site. This would include writing a program that you would run on your computer, which would save a copy of the feed from that site into a file on your computer. If that file is in a folder that's a git repo, then you could do a "git diff" which would show you when the file changes.

Here is a start of a program that could be used to write the feed to a file. What this program does is read a feed. Then does some reformatting of the feed so each piece of information is on a separate line. It then saves this reformatted feed into a file. There are other changes I'd probably make to this file, such as deleting certain "id" fields, because they change each time a feed is refreshed. You don't need "git diff" to show these changes.

Anyway, here's a copy of the program I started. This could be used as a starting point...

<?php

get_feed('http://local.test/wp4/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=meetings&key=8c44283c1a98168a3c773ec635b3086a', 'wp4.json');
//get_feed('', '');

function get_feed($feed_url, $output_file) {
    $raw = file_get_contents($feed_url);

    $output = str_replace('",', '",' . PHP_EOL . '    ', $raw);
    $output = str_replace(',"', ',' . PHP_EOL . '    "', $output);
    $output = str_replace('},{', PHP_EOL . '  },' . PHP_EOL . '  {' . PHP_EOL . '    ', $output);
    $output = str_replace('}]', PHP_EOL . '  }' . PHP_EOL . ']' . PHP_EOL, $output);
    $output = str_replace('[{', PHP_EOL . '[' . PHP_EOL . '  {' . PHP_EOL . '    ', $output);

    file_put_contents($output_file, $output);
}

If you want me to, I can do additional work to clean up this process...

[kiyote33]

The Data Source Change Detection feature plugin that I'm working on does something similar to what Brian is suggesting. It came about from my first attempts to resolve issue #42 (data source automation). The new plugin will notify web admins when there is a difference between their data source feed and the contents loaded on their website. It compares live feeds to the website meeting list and sends an email when a difference is detected. The clone version has been running successfully in test for the last 3 months simulating the Area 78 website which maintains non Calgary or Edmonton meeting records, and simply pulls records from the Calgary & Edmonton central offices who maintain the records for their regions.

[joshreisner]

great to note that the simple way of doing this will not catch the case when a meeting is omitted from a CSV or JSON import. i think it's ok though to move forward with this request and just consider that gap a disadvantage of maintaining your list externally