Foren / Cotonti / Extensions / New Notifier module

notifications in forums and comments would be nice, it is necessary to follow the themes.

I mean notifications to users.

You can already do that with the existing global profile tags and a little javascript. I think the tag you need is {PHP.usr.profile.user_newpm} which will be 1 if the user has a new pm. You could write something like this (JavaScript):

if ({PHP.usr.profile.user_newpm}) {
  alert("You have a new private message");
}

This will show the alert every time until the pm is read, which may not be what you want. You could use a cookie to show the alert only once.

Nevertheless, the feature you describe got me to think about alternative ways to notify a user. I don't plan on implementing other channels such as PM, SMS or push notifications (e.g. APNS), but I will look into an easy way to allow other plugins to add such functionality. I think I'll at the very least include some global template tags to allow you to notify users on-site about updates. Of course there will also be hooks so plugins can hook into the notifier module.

PM notifications will not be implemented because PM is on-site, which means you'd still have to visit the site in order to see your notifications. The goal of the module is to increase user engagement by sending them notifications in a way which does not require them to visit the site. Basically it's a way to prevent people to forget about the site.

Recently I've been working on getting both HTML and plaintext emails working. Here's a screenshot of two messages (HTML and plaintext, as viewed in GMail) sent by Notifier to two different users which are subscribed to the same topic. One has enabled HTML emails, while the other has disabled it.

Here's a screenshot of the subscriptions overview and settings panel:

Going great so far! I didn't even think it would have such subscription options.

#35088 Trustmaster:

Going great so far! I didn't even think it would have such subscription options.

me neither, looks very nice Gert.. think this plugin will end up being used a lot :)

I'll put it on github soon. I'm still working on a practical way to handle the periodic digests, which is a bit of a struggle. Expect a release candidate within a week.

Added 1 weeks later:

The beta is now available on Github: https://github.com/GHengeveld/cot-notifier

Periodic digests and auto-subscribe is not yet supported. Only the 'forumtopic' area is completely implemented so far. Everything else should work fine.

Ah, I forgot to add them to the config block. The tags are assigned by cot_notifier_tags(). Here's the list:

• NOTIFIER_SUBSCRIBED - true/false
• NOTIFIER_TOGGLE - link to toggle subscription on/off
• NOTIFIER_TOGGLE_URL - url to toggle subscription on/off
• NOTIFIER_TOGGLE_TEXT - text indicating what the toggle will do: Subscribe/Unsubscribe
• NOTIFIER_SUBSCRIPTIONS - link to list of subscriptions
• NOTIFIER_SUBSCRIPTIONS_URL - url to list of subscriptions

Normally you'll only need to add {NOTIFIER_TOGGLE} and {NOTIFIER_SUBSCRIPTIONS} in forums.posts.tpl.