Mutualdiscovery
Our goal is to foster mutual discovery among learners at all stages of cognitive and meta-cognitive growth. Project members take on shifting roles as teacher, student, facilitator, coach, peer and colleague.
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Mutualdiscovery » TWikiUsers » AndrewSutters
Foswiki Contribution IdeaThe IdeaI've been looking through the foswiki website and have been somewhat overwhelmed by the vast quantities of information on there. I'd like to make some kind of contribution but I'm afraid my skills may hinder me making any kind of useful addition. That being said... here is my idea. I work part time in a technical support position and they have been thinking of implementing some kind of knowledge base. I of course told them about wiki's What I would like to add in to the wiki would be something somewhere on the page that you could either 1) Add an email address to, which would then email the current page to the person's email address you entered or 2) A button that would pop up a box to enter the email address to.
This would allow a tech support rep to search the knowledge base, which could be potentially filled with "HowTo's", and then email the page found to the user. If the wiki was internal this would be the easiest way of giving the information over or if the wiki was externally accessible by "customers" you could forward the url to them using this plugin.
Feedback from HilaryHolzhmmmm, how interesting. I think I see what you want to do and why (and I think it is a great, great idea, by the way), but I’d like to be sure that we are on the same page, and I want to try to do that without influencing where you are going in your design. So... Could you sketch out a scenario for each of your two use cases (internal wiki and customer-support wiki)? It's ok to say [...and then magic happens here...] at various points in a scenario as part of the design process.The Idea Explained (a little more indepth)Ok so we could potentially have two different scenarios. Preamble - In a customer service/ tech support environment if a customer phones in with a problem, the agent needs to either try and fix the problem over the phone or create a ticket for a support agent to go and see the person to try and fix their problem. 1) In scenario one, a customer calls asking how they go about setting up a particular program. Now because the wiki is such that it is only available to the tech (the customers have no access to this wiki), the agent can search through the wiki to find the particular install "howto". When the agent has found the relevant page they will want to give it to the customer to follow (somehow), this is done in an effort to get the customer to fix the problem themselves (if it is simple enough) to prevent the need for a tech to go out and do it. To do this they will enter the email address of the customer into a field on the right of the wiki page and below it there will be a "MailIt" button. This button will grab the current page of text that the agent has found and email it to the customer. The customer will receive all of the html generated text in an email detailing how to set up the program. In essence the "MailIt" button will send the "HowTo" page in an email format to the person. 2) In scenario two, the only thing that differs is that the customer does have access to the wiki pages. The wiki is open to the public and is viewable by all customers in the firm/organization. Therefore when they call up looking for information on a certain program install, the agent can, instead of sending them the whole page as an email, send them the url of the page with the "howto" on it. This scenario will also have the same field and "MailIt" button setup but this time only the url will be sent. This will hopefully cut out a couple of steps like opening an email program, copy and pasting the url, etc. Although this seems like a bit of a waste of time, the ease of operation will help the agent in his day to day life, especially if you imagine them taking 50-60 calls in a day. The standard email would be sent with the email address of either the agent logged in or the "servicedesk" as a return address. It would also be signed by one of the two. In a slightly more complicated and verbose approach, clicking the "MailIt" button would either popup a box or redirect to a new page, where you could enter more details in the email, such as extra instructions, attachments, return email address, etc. Hopefully this makes a little more sense that before
The ResearchThings to look for:
<a href="%WEBLOGOURL%">%WEBLOGOALT%</a> <noautolink>
* <form name="jumpForm" action="%SCRIPTURLPATH{"view"}%/%BASEWEB%/%BASETOPIC%"><input id="jumpFormField" type="text" class="foswikiInputField" name="topic" value="" size="18" /><noscript> <input type="submit" class="foswikiButton" size="5" name="submit" value="%MAKETEXT{"Jump"}%" /> </noscript> </form>
* <form name="quickSearchForm" action="%SCRIPTURLPATH{view}%/%BASEWEB%/WebSearch"><input type="text" class="foswikiInputField" id="quickSearchBox" name="search" value="" size="18" /><input type="hidden" name="scope" value="all" /><input type="hidden" name="web" value="%BASEWEB%" /><noscript> <input type="submit" size="5" class="foswikiButton" name="submit" value="%MAKETEXT{"Search"}%" /> </noscript> </form>
* %INCLUDE{%SYSTEMWEB%.LanguageSelector}%
</noautolink>
<noscript>...</noscript>
Replacement content for scripts. Unlike script this can only be used as a block-level element.
Standardised in HTML 4.0; still current.
Prevent automatic linking of WikiWords and acronyms (if set to on); link WikiWords (if empty); can be overwritten by web preferences:
* #Set NOAUTOLINK =
* Note: You can still use the [[...][...]] syntax to link topics if you disabled WikiWord linking. The <noautolink> ... </noautolink> syntax can be used to prevents links within a block of text.
Reflecting on ResearchIt certainly took a lot of research but I think I am now ready to get underway with the coding and implementation. Before I do so I want to break it down into "todo's" again.
Code IdeasThe Form<FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="http://localhost/cgi-bin/mailit.pl">. Email This Page <INPUT TYPE=text NAME=emailaddress VALUE="my.address@example.com"> <INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="MailIt"> </FORM>Which then becomes... <noautolink> <FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="http://localhost/cgi-bin/mailit.pl">. Email This Page <INPUT TYPE=text NAME=emailaddress VALUE="my.address@example.com"> <noscript><INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="MailIt"></noscript> </FORM> </noautolink>For some reason it doesn't want to display the form. There must be another setting somewhere........ Found it! All of the form code needs to be made "Protected on save" for it to pop up as the actual form in the wiki. Update (Mon June 8th 09) |<sticky> </sticky><sticky><noautolink></sticky><sticky><form method=get action="http://localhost/cgi-bin/mailit.pl"></sticky><sticky><center>Email This Page</center></sticky><sticky><input type=text name=emailaddress value="my.address@example.com" size="18"></sticky><sticky><center><input type=submit value="Mail It"></center></form></sticky><sticky></noautolink></sticky>|This is the code that lives in the WebLeftBarExample? .txt, located in /var/www/foswiki/data/System. Editing this directly is the same as using the edit button in the wiki. This shows the final and updated code for the mailit button element. The Next StepsNow that the input box and button are in place and working it's time to create the perl module. I'm going to through the following stages
use lib qw(/myPerl/myModules/); use SayHello;I moved the folder to /usr/lib/perl5 and renamed it to a short name of chilkat. Thus I will include the following in my code. use lib qw(/usr/lib/perl5/chilkat/); use chilkat;I'm not exactly sure this is correct, but it seems so. I'm having some trouble getting the perl file to execute from within apache. When I click on the mailit button I am getting this.. Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@andy-laptop and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.I have tried replacing the mailit.pl file with a simple hello world file and eventually got it to run. It needed to have its permissions changed to 0755, have the #!/usr/bin/perl included and also print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";For it to work. Looking at the apache logs in /etc/httpd/logs i see this... [Sun Jun 07 11:33:12 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Can't locate loadable object for module chilkat in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/chilkat/ /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl .) at /usr/lib/perl5/chilkat//chilkat.pm line 11, referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample [Sun Jun 07 11:33:12 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Compilation failed in require at /var/www/cgi-bin/mailit.pl line 6., referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample [Sun Jun 07 11:33:12 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /var/www/cgi-bin/mailit.pl line 6., referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample [Sun Jun 07 11:33:12 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of script headers: mailit.pl, referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExampleNot so pretty... Hit a rather large brick wall..... "The Chilkat Perl module is only available for Microsoft Windows computers. A Perl program must load it using this code:" Back to the drawing board  Need to find a new email sending perl module.
So a quick search on google turned up a lot of good stuff for "perl email module using gmail". Theres even a module on CPAN which I'm going to try and use first, there were a lot of other options...
Installing this module is appearing harder than I first expected as cpanp doesn't seem to find it and either does yum. It has a lot of dependencies. Had a look at the SEND::EMAIL module and it says its outdated but i've found a lot of examples using it. There's so many email modules its hard to tell which one to use, quite overwhelming..
Well I'm somewhat lost right now, been trying to use this website and install Email::Send::SMTP::TLS. It took quite a lot of dependency installs, important note: helps to have gcc installed!
So I think I have all of the dependencies installed and I tried to run this script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Email::Send;
my $mailer = Email::Send->new( {
mailer => 'SMTP::TLS',
mailer_args => [
Host => 'smtp.gmail.com',
Port => 587,
User => 'webbasedsysemailer',
Password => 'xxxxxx',
Hello => 'test.org',
]
} );
use Email::Simple::Creator; # or other Email::
my $email = Email::Simple->create(
header => [
From => 'webbasedsysemailer@gmail.com',
To => 'asutters@horizon.csueastbay.edu',
Subject => 'Test email',
],
body => 'This is a test email',
);
eval { $mailer->send($email) };
die "Error sending email: $@" if $@;
But when I run the file, no emails get sent. My idea was to use gmail to send the emails and so now I'm looking at the Email::Send::Gmail module. One of these things has to work!!
Update: well I spent the best part of 5 hours trying to get something to work. I tried sendmail which had problems with permissions, then I tried to install Email::Send::Gmail. However the dependencies would not install with cpanp or by manually downloading them and trying to install them. For some reason I had forgotten about yum. After stumbling across this webpage I noticed the author had mentioned installing the dependencies from a repository!! The lightbulb turns on So low and behold, I searched for and installed:
i Email::Send::GmailAnd it worked. Note that you need to have Email::Send and Email::Simple::Creator installed first. These were easily enough installed with cpanp. Then looking at cpan for some example code I edited a new file chmod +x it and ran it. Some email finally turned up in my inbox!!
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Email::Send;
use Email::Send::Gmail;
use Email::Simple::Creator;
my $email = Email::Simple->create(
header => [
From => 'magic_monitoring@gmail.com',
To => 'acme@astray.com',
Subject => 'Server down',
],
body => 'The server is down. Start panicing.',
);
my $sender = Email::Send->new(
{ mailer => 'Gmail',
mailer_args => [
username => 'magic_monitoring@gmail.com',
password => 'XXX',
]
}
);
eval { $sender->send($email) };
die "Error sending email: $@" if $@;
I can now finally get on with trying to integrate this into the wiki.
Email Finally Working - Moving On
#!/usr/bin/perl
#use strict;
use warnings;
use Email::Send;
use Email::Send::Gmail;
use Email::Simple::Creator;
use CGI;
CGI::ReadParse();
my $emailAdd = $in{emailaddress};
my $email = Email::Simple->create(
header => [
From => 'webbasedsysemailer@gmail.com',
To => $emailAdd,
Subject => 'Your Help Request',
],
body => "Please see this url for further information: $ENV{HTTP_REFERER}",
);
my $sender = Email::Send->new(
{ mailer => 'Gmail',
mailer_args => [
username => 'webbasedsysemailer@gmail.com',
password => 'xxxxx',
]
}
);
eval { $sender->send($email) };
print "content-type: text/html\n\n";
print <<EOF;
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Success</TITLE>
<HEAD>
<BODY>
<H3><CENTER>You have sent an email to $emailAdd</H3></CENTER>
<H3><CENTER>It contained the url: $ENV{HTTP_REFERER}</H3></CENTER>
<H3><CENTER> Return link: <a href="$ENV{HTTP_REFERER}">Take Me Back</a></H3></CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
EOF
die "Error sending email: $@" if $@;
It does the following:
[Mon Jun 08 13:37:31 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Global symbol "%in" requires explicit package name at /var/www/cgi-bin/mailit.pl line 10., referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample [Mon Jun 08 13:37:31 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Execution of /var/www/cgi-bin/mailit.pl aborted due to compilation errors., referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample [Mon Jun 08 13:37:31 2009] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of script headers: mailit.pl, referer: http://andy-laptop/foswiki/System/WebLeftBarExample
What About Scenario 1??When I originally started out with this project, my intentions were to implement scenario 1. Scenario 2 was just supposed to be a stepping stone to the final goal of sending the whole html page as an email. But with the discovery that my intended set of modules were for windows only?!?! this kind of sunk the ship as it were, primarily due to the lack of time to try and implement the thing on my own, which I don't think I have the perl knowledge yet to do anyways... Also, the implementation of scenario 2 was far harder than I had originally anticipated... So that being said, I'd like to quickly go over the Scenario 1 example and plan out how I or somebody else could go about implementing it, based on the idea I had. Also I may throw some extra ideas about.
Summary and Final CodeWell my time is up, I have to get started studying for my Finals and so this is the end of the project. I hope that what I have done will be of use to somebody and that I explained it in a thorough enough manner that it could be taken further. The final code for the MailIt? form and the perl email script can be found below.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#use strict;
use warnings;
use Email::Send;
use Email::Send::Gmail;
use Email::Simple::Creator;
use CGI;
CGI::ReadParse();
my $emailAdd = $in{emailaddress};
my $email = Email::Simple->create(
header => [
From => 'webbasedsysemailer@gmail.com',
To => $emailAdd,
Subject => 'Your Help Request',
],
body => "Please see this url for further information: $ENV{HTTP_REFERER}",
);
my $sender = Email::Send->new(
{ mailer => 'Gmail',
mailer_args => [
username => 'webbasedsysemailer@gmail.com',
password => 'xxxxx',
]
}
);
eval { $sender->send($email) };
print "content-type: text/html\n\n";
print <<EOF;
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Success</TITLE>
<HEAD>
<BODY>
<H3><CENTER>You have sent an email to $emailAdd</H3></CENTER>
<H3><CENTER>It contained the url: $ENV{HTTP_REFERER}</H3></CENTER>
<H3><CENTER> Return link: <a href="$ENV{HTTP_REFERER}">Take Me Back</a></H3></CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
EOF
die "Error sending email: $@" if $@;
This may look ugly, but is actual foswiki wiki code for the button and form.
|<sticky> </sticky><sticky><noautolink></sticky><sticky><form method=get action="http://localhost/cgi-bin/mailit.pl"></sticky><sticky><center>Email This Page</center></sticky><sticky><input type=text name=emailaddress value="my.address@example.com" size="18"></sticky><sticky><center><input type=submit value="Mail It"></center></form></sticky><sticky></noautolink></sticky>|In it's regular form it looks like this <FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="http://localhost/cgi-bin/mailit.pl">. Email This Page <INPUT TYPE=text NAME=emailaddress VALUE="my.address@example.com"> <INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="MailIt"> </FORM>-- AndrewSutters - 21 May 2009 |
Reference Desk
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| r13 - 13 Jun 2009 - 15:50:23 - HilaryHolz
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