collective.mustread 2.2.1

Tracking user views on content items marked as must-read

Track reads on content objects in Plone.

Features

• Mark objects as must-read

• Keep a record of first reads of content objects per user

• Query if a specific user has read a specific content object

• List top-x of content objects by user reads in a specific time window

Compatibility

Plone 5.2 and Plone 5.1 users should use version 2.x of collective.mustread. Plone 5.0 users should use version 1.x of collective.mustread.

Limitations

This is not a install-and-forget plugin for Plone.

This product does not track reads out of the box. It merely provides a backend you can use for doing so.

Development of this backend was sponsored by Quaive. Quaive has it’s own frontend integration on top of this backend to cater for the specific use cases Quaive needs. We hope that this generic backend is useful for other Plone projects as well.

Rationale

If you’d want a naive implementation to track reads, you could simply create a behavior that stores a list of user ids on every content object.

Obviously that would soon destroy your site with database writes.

Instead, this backend is designed to:

• Be compatible with async scheduling, even if it does not provide async itself.

• Be flexible to support multiple policy scenarios, without having to rewrite or fork the whole backend.

• Use a pluggable SQL backend instead of the ZODB, both to offload writes and to make it easier to run reporting queries.

Architecture

You’re forgiven for thinking the architecture below is overly complex. Please see the rationale above.

Not included in collective.mustread is the frontend and async part:

[ user browser ]  -> [ view ] -> [ async queue  ]

The backend implementation in this package provides the following:

[ @@mustread-hit ] -> [behavior] -> [database store]

Let’s narrate that starting at the database end.

Database

The database storage provides a rich API as specified in collective.mustread.interfaces.ITracker.

By default collective.mustread writes to an in-memory sqlite database. Data will be lost on zope-server restarts.

To persist your data you can use a sqlite-database-file.

• Either call the @@init-mustread-db view (to create a sqlite db located in BUILDOUT/var/mustread.db)

• or set up your database path manually in the registry and call the @@init-mustread-db view after that ( e.g. to share it with other addons - see Auditlog compatibility)

Auditlog compatibility

If you’re running collective.auditlog on your site, you might consider using the same database (so you only need one active database-connector)

The SQL store is derived from the collective.auditlog implementation. We’ve designed collective.mustread to be compatible with collective.auditlog to the point where we’ll even re-use the database connector from auditlog if possible.

The database connection is configured via a registry record collective.mustread.interfaces.IMustReadSettings. You typically want this to contain the same value as your auditlog configuration.

Make sure to call @@init-mustread-db to create the necessary tables/columns needed by this package in the database.

Behaviors

We provide two behaviors:

• collective.mustread.maybe_must_read basically only provides a checkbox where you can specify whether a content object is ‘must-read’.

• collective.mustread.track_read_enabled activates view tracking on a content object. We track views even if IMaybeMustRead does not mark the object as ‘must-read’. The reason for this is we’d like to track popular content even if the items are not compulsory.

You’d typically activate both these behaviors on the content types you’d like to track.

These behaviors are not activated by default - the :default install profile only provides a browser layer and configures the database connector. It’s up to you to choose and implement your tracking policy in your own projects.

The behaviors provide a flex point where you can implement different tracking policies. You could create a behavior that only tracks reads for certain groups of users for example. You can easily do that by creating a new behavior in a few lines of code, with some extra business logic, which then re-uses our extensive read tracking API for the heavy lifting.

View

A helper view @@mustread-hit is available for all ITrackReadEnabledMarker i.e. all objects with the collective.mustread.track_read_enabled behavior activated. Hitting that view will store a read record in the database for the content object.

In Quaive we will hit this view from our async stack.

You could conceivably, instead of this view, provide a viewlet that accesses the tracking behavior and API. Just be aware that doing all of that full sync is a risk. YMMV.

There’s also a special debugging view @@mustread-hasread which will tell you whether the user you’re logged in as, has read the object you’re calling this view on.

Installation

Install collective.mustread by adding it to your buildout:

[buildout]

...

eggs =
    collective.mustread

and then running bin/buildout

Or use the built-in buildout:

virtualenv .
bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
bin/buildout bootstrap
bin/buildout

Using collective.mustread

The minimal steps required to actually use collective.mustread in your own project:

1. Install collective.mustread and configure a database connector. The default connector is a in-memory database which is not suitable for production.

2. Activate the collective.mustread.maybe_must_read and collective.mustread.track_read_enabled behaviors on the content types you’d like to track, via GenericSetup. Or roll your own custom behaviors.

3. For these content types, hit ${context/absolute_url}/@@mustread-hit when viewing the content. Ideally you’ll use some kind of async queue at this stage.

4. Use the tracker API to query the database and adjust your own browser views based on your own business logic. The recommended way to obtain the tracker is:

   from collective.mustread.interfaces import ITracker
   from zope.component import getUtility
   
   tracker = getUtility(ITracker)

Contribute

• Issue Tracker: https://github.com/collective/collective.mustread/issues

• Source Code: https://github.com/collective/collective.mustread

Support

If you are having issues, please let us know via the issue tracker.

License

The project is licensed under the GPLv2.

Contributors

• Guido A.J. Stevens, [e-mail]

• Harald Friessnegger, [e-mail]

Changelog

2.2.1 (2023-06-06)

• Remove deprecated code.

2.2.0 (2022-10-04)

• Make the test pass on Plone6

2.1.0 (2022-08-05)

• Added a new get_most_read_query method to the tracker to help integrators Refs. #17 [ale-rt]

2.0.2 (2021-06-28)

• Fix a deprecation warning [ale-rt]

2.0.1 (2021-05-20)

• The most_read method does not break when trying to fetch objects that the user cannot view. Fixes #14 [ale-rt]

2.0.0 (2020-01-27)

• Indicate end of database initialization in logs [thet]

• Support Plone 5.2 and Python2.7, Python 3.6 and Python 3.7 [ale-rt, thet]

1.1.1 (2019-03-25)

• Do not break on the upgrade step that adds columns to the mustread table [ale-rt]

1.1.0 (2017-05-11)

• Added the possibility to specify engine parameters through the registry [ale-rt]

• remove unneeded columns in ORM model (site_name, title, info) [fRiSi]

• Implemented API for scheduling items as must-read for certain users. (see collective.contentrules.mustread for usage)

  This required new database columns. The provided upgrade step works for sqlite databases but might need changes for mysql or postgres. [fRiSi]

• Allow to create and configure a database file by using the @@init-mustread-db view [fRiSI]

1.0.1 (2016-12-28)

• Provide verbose error logging when database is not accessible [gyst]

• Trivial testing change [gyst]

1.0 (2016-11-24)

• Initial release. [gyst]