Add email course alerts to notify when a spot opens up about rmc HOT 7 OPEN

I'd like to take a look at this - will get some UI mockups done over the weekend as I wrap up a work term here. Will probably work on top of #140

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Here's an early rough sketch of my ideas so far. Please give some feedback so we can improve on them!

Let's publicize this new feature on the profile page:

Cool! Let's try it out on the explore courses page:

What happens when we click on it?

Whenever a seat in this section opens up, the user receives an email and the alert is automatically removed from their profile.

But wait! I didn't want to be notified of open seats for that section.

Alternatively, I could remove this notification from my profile page:

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@ryandv This is really cool!

Here are my thoughts:

1. I like the idea of publicizing this on the profile page. This is also the sort of feature that would be just awesome to blast on our Facebook and Twitter, especially if we can roll this out during the first two weeks of class enrolment. So, it would be good to focus on just getting the core UI/functionality to work and get that checked in first.
2. I like the 1:1 mapping between an alert and a section of a course. Makes the UI simpler.
3. I like the idea of a bell icon with a tooltip explaining what it does on hover. However, what do you think about putting that in the "Enrolled" column immediately to the right of the number, something like:
4. How about make the tooltip say "Email me when a seat opens" to be more specific as to what will happen?
5. We don't need to show the alarm button on non-full courses, right?
6. Another advantage of the alert icon directly within the table is that it is easy to immediately tell which rows you've set an alert on, for example by changing the state of the icon to a filled-in one for alerts that have been set. On hover, the filled-in bell icon can turn into an 'X' icon to indicate that clicking will remove the set alert.
7. Love the toaster notifications on click. Great touch, and consistent with our add/remove course UI.
8. Also like the alerts on profile page. Maybe the heading can say "Seat opening alerts" to be more specific. It would be good to also show which specific sections you added for a course, but that can be done later.

Overall, core UX LGTM. I think you can start on this! Just start w/ the UI on the course page and submit a pull request for that; the other profile UI bits can be done later.

I've checked in PR #140, which provides most of the backend for this feature. You just have to subclass BaseCourseAlert and add an API endpoint — just look at how that PR does it for GCM (for Android push notifications) and do something similar. We use Amazon SES for emailing; feel free to ask @mduan any questions about that as he did all of our email infrastructure. You may need our AWS key to test emailing; when you get to that let us know.

Anyone else have thoughts? @mduan @phleet @jswu @phleet

I'm really excited to see this.

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Nice work on the mockups @ryandv!

I generally agree with what @divad12 said. Specifically I think using a bell icon or something similar that is always visible is a good idea. That way, it's easy to know what courses you have alerts for at a glance.

I also like the idea of showing the alerts for courses on the user's profile page. For these course alerts on the profile page, I think we can reuse the table of section offerings here. This way, we can add or remove alerts for individual sections from the table of section offerings similar to how you added them from the explore courses page. Alternatively, we can either remove alerts for all sections of a course by clicking the large "X" to the left of the course card (as shown in your last screenshot).

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Yep, agreed with @mduan, would be good to re-use that sections table UI (which is literally two lines of code to enable, though it may be a bit more in your case). But, we can do that later. :)

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Great stuff @ryandv! I'm in strong agreement with what @divad12 and @mduan have both said.

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Awesome! Will start working on this now.

@divad12 The alarm bell next to the enrollment capacity sounds like a better idea. I think this would probably be more intuitive, especially if we do not display the icon next to courses with free slots. I'll definitely take your feedback into consideration - thanks!

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