RSS Feeds for specific roles

[ramon]

Hello all,

I'm not an expert on RSS, and the main concern with the idea I'll present here would be security, but I felt the need to comment on this, as this may help "solve" some of the e-mail notification problems in OJS, due to the fact that e-mail has become a problem rather than a solution.

Would it be possible to create RSS Feeds for specific roles?
This means that the authors, reviewers, editors, and so forth, would be able to sign up for a custom, "secure", RSS Feed.
It would display the "news" on each of their activities, including information on editorial decisions, tasks to be done, forgotten tasks, etc.

How difficult would it be, if possible and secure, to create this RSS Roles Feeds plugin?

[mcrider]

Hi Ramon,

I think this idea can be thrown in to the amalgam of discussion wrt notification in OJS in recent days. There has been discussion of allowing users to customize what system events they can get email notifications for (see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3922), and also a built-in notification system (using jQuery, which we've just added a plugin for here: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3917) to alert users on certain pages and bring attention to important parts of the page. So, yeah, a revamping of the notification system is definitely on our minds, and will be certainly be developed in the future.

I for one can see RSS feeds being brought into the mix as a sort of centralized OJS notification system, perhaps that mimics a page in OJS that groups together all updates for the user (I know, I know, analogies can be drawn to Facebook, but hey, its a proven technology!) I can't speak too much on the security of RSS, although I know feeds can be password protected, but I doubt it would be too much of a security concern anyway as it would just provide information to users--They'd still have to log in to OJS to perform any actions.

Anyway, thanks for the input.

Cheers,
Matt