Sneak Peak: Announcements plugin (Patreon)

Last week I told you about my plan to add some kind of push notification mechanism to OctoPrint that would allow to notify people of important announcements such as important security updates or situations like the current funding issues. 

Back when there was that update bug in 1.2.7 that could be fixed by installing a simple plugin I sorely missed such a mechanism. I had no reliable channel to reach people on their current OctoPrint instances who do not follow the social media accounts in order to tell them about the steps needed to update and it made things unnecessarily complicated. Since then I've been playing around with the idea of adding a simple RSS reader and that's what I've done now in form of the new bundled announcement plugin. 

The design of the reader dialog is not final (it's still too crowded I think and the difference of read vs. unread items is too hard to spot), but in general the whole plugin already works fine:

• It uses regular RSS feeds as data source, so other sites can in theory also be added, even though the settings dialog currently doesn't have channel addition built in.
• There are two priorities for announcement channels (red vs. yellow notifications).
• All but the "Important" channel can be disabled.
• The channel feeds are cached server side for a couple of hours, so no unnecessary traffic should be generated.

I'll test the plugin a bit more over the next couple of days and setup the actual feed sources online, and if stuff appears to work out without any issues I'll merge it into the current 1.2.11 branch and go for the next release :)

For some more screenshots, please see this album.