Subscription management

Silva has a finely grained subscription feature. Visitors can subscribe and receive email notification when a part or parts of the site are updated. The Silva Manager enables the subscription feature for the whole site. Editors activate this subscription function for some or all of the content they have Editor privileges for.

Activating subscriptions from Silva

An Editor can enable the subscription feature for a particular subtree or individual document from the Silva management area.

1. Go to the area of the site where you’d like to activate the subscriptions feature.

2. Click on the properties tab and then click the ‘subscriptions...’ button. (This button won’t be visible if your manager hasn’t enabled subscriptions in the site.)

The Editor can choose to enable or disable the subscriptions feature for a document or folder or publication, or decide to let the setting be acquired from its parent (this is the default).

The Silva root has the subscription feature set to ‘Off’ by default. In other words, even if the Manager enables the feature, no content can be subscribed to until it is activated by the Editor.

Fig. 1. Subscriptions settings

How site visitors use the subscription feature

For a visitors to be able to subscribe to part of a site, they need to click on a ‘subscribe to this page’ link (provided by your template, see the Silva documentation pages for an example) and then fill in the subscription form.

Fig.2 Subscription forms

The Subscription service will then send out an email confirmation message to the email address supplied. This message contains a link that, if clicked, will confirm the subscription.

Canceling a subscription follows a similar pattern: the user clicks the ‘unsubscribe’ button in the subscription user interface. The confirmation email contains a link that, if followed, will cancel the subscription.

Once subscribed a visitor will receive a message whenever a document is published. This email will contain a link to the document, as well as a link to the subscription form for unsubscribing.

Visitors can also subscribe to Silva Folders and Publications. This means they’ll be notified about all changes of content contained in these areas. In other words, visitors can subscribe to a complete subtree of the content.