Send email for publishing content   

WCM contains email actions - so yes. Look at the InfoCenter for details on the email action.

Michael Fromin
Ephox
http://www.ephox.com/ibm

If that does not work you can use the API. There is an API call on the Workspace that gets all content changes since a given point in time:


findContentModifiedSince

public com.ibm.workplace.wcm.api.DocumentIdIterator findContentModifiedSince(java.util.Date modifiedDate)

Returns an iterator of IDs of all Content that have been modified since the specified date. The IDs returned will include those for Content that have been modified on the given date. If no content has been modified since this date, or the user has access to no documents in this set, then the iterator will not return any elements. null will never be returned.
Parameters:
modifiedDate - the date with which to compare Content last modified date
Returns:
an iterator over objects modified since the given date that are visibile to the current user

...or if you have 6.0.1.3 there is some new API stuff that you can tie to workflow. There is a nice article on developerWorks on that concept.

Michael Fromin
Ephox
http://www.ephox.com/ibm

For emails, the out of the box WCM workflow email is not customizable. There are many possible options, here are 3:
1) Use custom workflow action (If you're on 6.1). When the custom workflow action is triggered, use java mail API to send email
2) Use PZN Email rule. They allow customizable email messages, and can be used with the portal user collection to retrieve user email addresses
3) Use java mail API outside of custom workflow. Once you determine which content you want to mail about (perhaps using Michaels logic) then you have the content you want to mail about.

I will be posting a wiki topic shortly on how to allow users to subscribe to content changes. It combines #2 and #3, in that it runs a background task every x minutes to find content thats been changed since the last run. Then it checks to see who is subscribed to that content, and then uses a PZN rule to send an email to that user.

Christopher Knight