Topic: New Plugin: Group Activity Stream Email Notifications

New Plugin: Group Activity Stream Email Notifications

@aekeron

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

Okay..this is another plugin that I’m asking for help with testing on, sorry However, this will defnitely be released this week, barring an act of god or some equivalent non-religious reason.

This plugin emails the members of a group with details of any activity stream update that occurs within their group. The settings for these updates can be configured via the group homepage > notifications area (this is specific to individual groups, hence why this isn’t in the user’s profile/settings area).

A few more details are noted on my blog post here:

http://namoo.co.uk/blog/2010/02/01/group-activity-stream-email-notifications/

Please note: This plugin is not recommended for sites that expect to have a large userbase. I imagine it would put a fair amount of extra strain on your server due to the large volume of emails/etc.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

@miguael

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

Grrrrrreat!!! Please let me know where I can download it, so that I can install and test it. This is a crucial “thing” for our members…!

Ps: Would it be possible, that the members can choose, if they want to notify the others (like it was/is in the old group-wire)? BUT- I will first test it

@aekeron

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

Hmm… The forums ate my reply (twice!)

If you can test on the http://namoo.co.uk site for now and provide some feedback I should be able to release the plugin this week

In regards to your other question – it should be possible but it’s not something I can look into for a couple of weeks due to workload sorry.

@mikepratt

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

@D Cartwright I am sure I am confused but isn’t this the same as Boone’s (or ours) group notifications plugin? If it’s diff, please tell me how as I am big into as many notification options as possible. Thanks.

@r-a-y

Keymaster

14 years, 10 months ago

@Mike,

This isn’t the same.

This gives email notification to group activity stream updates.

Boone’s plugin and yours only does group forum email notifications.

@aekeron

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

Thanks, r-a-y,

Basically what r-a-y has said is completely correct. It hooks into the action for recording an activity and then emails everyone in the group with a notification of the activity. The idea of this is that it can catch pretty much anything related to a group – so forums, ‘wire posts’, group joins, wiki edits, etc can all be included. By default it will support the buddypress basic functions + our groupwiki functions but I’m also trying to build in an easy way for people to extend this to support their own plugins with just a small amount of additional code to their plugin file.

Even without building in specific support for a plugin this will grab an activity update for a group and email it out, with a generic description for the activity type rather than something specific.

The feedback I’ve had so far suggests that users want a bit more control over default behviour/settings of the plugin and for a way for group admins/mods to post ‘must have’ alerts. I’m hoping to add this in the next couple of days and get the plugin out by Friday or some point over the weekend.

@mikepratt

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

@D Cartwright Cool idea. With fine grain granularity of which items generate notifications, my plugin and Boone’s are rendered obsolete (given we just cover one form of activity really)

Happy to test when it’s ready.

@aekeron

Participant

14 years, 10 months ago

@mikepratt

I was originally going to make use of one of the forum subscription plugins but our students have requested to be “spammed to death” with updates regarding their collaborative group work – much like facebook. Of course, now that they have got their wish they realise that receiving a huge raft of emails regarding your work each day isn’t quite as fun as hearing about what your friends did on facebook…

I’ve posted an update on where I’m at with the plugin and what I’m planning to implement before release this weekend. The link is below but I’ll also cut+paste the content as it’s probably going to get more people reading it if it’s on here rather than my small dev site.

Update:

Current bugs fixed. Will be adding the following requested features in the next couple of days with planned release on fri/sat/sun:

1) Userâ€™s have to be registered X amount of time for their activites to email people. Warning about this in the notifications screen. Amount of time defaults to 1 week but controllable in wp-admin backend.

2) Mention of the need to check these notification settings in the sidewide notifications area. Perhaps a list of links to the group notification settings for each group the user is a member of too.

3) Default behaviour for the plugin will be for activity updates to be off or at least infrequent. This default behaviour controllable by wp-admin backend.

4) Possibly change all notification settings to be time based as per the current group wiki edit ones

5) Enable group admins + mods to send out a group update that overrides group user settings in regards to not receiving updates. This will be done by ticking a box on the update screen, an extra â€œwhatâ€™s newâ€ bit in the group notifications area or a screen in the group admin area.

6) Finish the implementation to allow plugin authors to add their own action type handling

The aims of these changes are:

1) Keep the interface as simple as possible for all the site users

2) Have default behaviour that isnâ€™t too spammy

Possible future updates:

Ability for users to have update â€˜digestsâ€™ received at a specified time daily. Allowing users to choose the time they receive the update should help spread server load.

http://namoo.co.uk/blog/2010/02/01/group-activity-stream-email-notifications/#comment-11