* adding a package Letters.pm, that manages Letters & alerts.
* adding feature : it's now possible to define a "letter" for any subscription created. If a letter is defined, users in OPAC can put an alert on the subscription. When an issue is marked "arrived", all users in the alert will recieve a mail (as defined in the "letter"). This last part (= send the mail) is not yet developped. (Should be done this week)
* adding feature : it's now possible to "put to an alert" in OPAC, for any serial subscription. The alert is stored in a new table, called alert. An alert can be put only if the librarian has activated them in subscription (and they activate it just by choosing a "letter" to sent to borrowers on new issues)
* adding feature : librarian can see in borrower detail which alerts they have put, and a user can see in opac-detail which alert they have put too.
Note that the system should be generic enough to manage any type of alert.
I plan to extend it soon to virtual shelves : a borrower will be able to put an alert on a virtual shelf, to be warned when something is changed in the virtual shelf (mail being sent once a day by cron, or manually by the shelf owner. Anyway, a mail won't be sent on every change, users would be spammed by Koha ;-) )
* module (acquisition, catalogue...) : it will be usefull to show the librarian only letters he may be interested by.
* title, that will be used as mail subject.
the letter table contains 3 fields :
* code => the code of the letter
* name => the complete name of the letter
* content => the complete text. It's a TEXT field type, so has no limits.
My next goal now is to work on point 2-I "serial issue alert"
With this feature, in serials, a user can subscribe the "issue alert". For every issue arrived/missing, a mail is sent to all subscribers of this list. The mail warns the user that the issue is arrive or missing. Will be in head.
(see mail on koha-devel, 2005/04/07)
The "serial issue alert" will be the 1st to use this letter system that probably needs some tweaking ;-)
Once it will be stabilised default letters (in any languages) could be added during installer to help the library begin with this new feature.
