Theju's tryst with life

Followup Comments

Very often we post comments on many sites and it becomes very tedious to keep track of discussion thereafter. To make life easy, the site owners need to provide a "Follow-up" feature which would send an email whenever a comment is posted. From the user perspective, this option should be optional ie he should receive the email followups only if he subscribes to them.

So yesterday, I tried my hand at one such reusable app and it turned out to be easier than I thought.

Here's how to go about using it:

• Fetch the source from here.

• Add the COMMENTS_APP attribute to settings.py to reference followup_comments.

• Add a few additional attributes to the settings.py namely

  • EMAIL_HOST: If your SMTP server is on a different machine
  • EMAIL_PORT: If your port is different than a default
  • EMAIL_HOST_USER: If authentication is enabled on SMTP server
  • EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD: If authentication is enabled
  • DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL: If you want to specify the from address

• Go to the admin page and add a Followup Message for the site of your choice.

• Then use the comments just like you would have used the vanilla comments framework.

Since I have worked on this app for a couple of hours, it still has some rough edges to it. A couple that I could find out were:

• The signal is getting invoked twice. Not sure why this is happening! Anyone experienced this situation before?
• Should I make the from email address a part of the FollowUpMessage model? This would make it possible to have a different email address for each site that uses the feature.

Please give me your feedback on how you like this project.