Welcome to collective.ifttt!

Introduction

ifttt.com - If This Then That, also known as IFTTT (pronounced /ɪft/) - is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. These applets can perform a configured action in response to a trigger. Triggers and actions are web services provided by platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, Spotify - and now, Plone sites.

Below are a few examples of IFTTT applets for better understanding:

• If a video is liked on Youtube, then save the video details in Evernote
• If a profile picture gets changed on Facebook, then update the same profile picture on Twitter
• If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook, then save it to my phone gallery
• If I receive an email about a new Twitter follower in my Gmail inbox, then tweet the new follower a welcome message
• If NASA posts a new astronomy picture of the day, then add it to my screensaver gallery.
• Email me about Top Apps that have become FREE in the Apple App Store.
• Automatically unmute my Android phone when I get back home.
• Add a Spotify song from a liked YouTube Video.

collective.ifttt is an addon which enables any Plone site to play in the IFTTT ecosystem by allowing you to create IFTTT applets.

Below are a few examples of using IFTTT with Plone sites.

• If a news item is published, then tweet about it or post it on Facebook.
• If an event is published, then add it to my calendar.
• If new users sign up for an event, then add them to a Slack channel.
• If content changes, then record who edited it in a Google spreadsheet.

Contents

This documentation will teach you how to use collective.ifttt to create IFTTT applets for Plone sites. We’ll start with setting up a Plone RSS feed, which can be used on IFTTT without doing anything special. In the sections after that you will learn how to set up your IFTTT secret key and create IFTTT triggers, so you can create more customized applets.

Enabling RSS Feeds On Plone Sites

Introduction

Plone can generate RSS feeds from folderish content types like folders and collections. First you must enable syndication on your site so that RSS feeds will be generated. Then you can go to the collection or folder you want to use as a feed and adjust its syndication settings.

If you want to aggregate a particular set of content to an RSS feed, you can create a collection content item for that purpose. You can choose what content types to aggregate and filter by fields such as labels, dates, location or language. Collections are language aware so this works correctly on multilingual sites.

Once you have an RSS feed you can use it on IFTTT without doing anything special. (No secret key, no IFTTT trigger needed.)

Below are the steps to create an example RSS Feed on a Plone site. You can tweak the configuration to meet your requirements and make different kinds of RSS feeds given the flexibility of collections.

Enabling Syndication

Step 1

Go to Site Setup.

Step 2

Select Syndication under General.

Step 3

Select the following and save:

1. Allowed
2. Search RSS enabled (if you want to be able to use search results as feeds)
3. Show settings button (this will enable the Syndication tab on the edit bar of folders and collections)
4. Show feed link (this allows you to show an RSS link on the folder or collection)
5. Save

You may optionally include author information and adjust the maximum number of feed items.

Creating a Collection to Use as an RSS Feed

Step 1

Go to the site root. (This is a special type of object, so the Syndication tab will not show on the edit bar here, like it will on all other folders.)

Step 2

Add a new collection.

Step 3

Configure your collection. The configuration explained below will aggregate all available published content. This can be tweaked to suit your own requirements.

1. Update Title to “Plone Site - RSS feed” or any other suitable name.
2. For Select Criteria, choose Review State as Published. (Otherwise unpublished items will show in your feed and people will get an error when they click on that URL.)
3. For Sort On choose Effective date and check Reversed Order.

Step 4

On the Settings tab check Exclude from navigation if you want to make it disappear from the navigation tree.

Save your new collection.

Step 5

If the collection’s content seems to be right, publish it using the State menu on the edit bar.

Viewing Your RSS Feed

Step 1

Your RSS feed can be viewed by appending /RSS to your collection’s (or folder’s) URL - something like /path_to_collection/RSS. For our example the URL to the RSS feed is http://localhost:8080/Plone/plone-site-rss-feed/RSS

Step 2

To show a link to the RSS feed on a collection or folder, enable it on the edit bar’s Syndication tab as shown below. This is an optional step - many sites choose not to show these feed links because it might confuse their users.

Now your RSS feed is ready to be used in an IFTTT applet. You can test it by copy-pasting the RSS URL into an RSS Reader, like feeder.co or Mozilla Reader.

Configuring a Plone Site with an IFTTT Secret Key

IFTTT supports push notification, which can be leveraged to get instant notifications from a Plone site. To do that you need to configure the Plone site with your IFTTT secret key.

Follow the steps below to get your IFTTT secret key and save it in your Plone site.

Obtaining an IFTTT Secret Key

1. Go to ifttt.com and sign up for an account.
2. At the top click on ‘Search’ and find ‘Maker’. (Update: this is now named ‘Webhook’.)

3. Click the ‘Connect’ button to create a Maker (Webhook) channel.

4. Click on the gear icon (Settings) on the top-right of the Maker (Webhook) channel to view your key.

Saving an IFTTT Secret Key in Plone

1. Go to Site Setup

2. Select IFTTT Settings under Add-on Configuration

3. Copy your key to the Secret Key field and click Save.