Date Reminder

Overview

Date Reminder lets you request email reminders to be sent before dates/times in Drupal nodes. Usually, the nodes in question are calendar events, but any node type with at least one date field can have reminders.

If a node has a date, a user can ask that a reminder be sent at a specified time before the event. A user can have multiple reminders scheduled for the same event. For example, one two days before, then another six hours before.

Date Reminder is particularly useful for repeating events. If, for example, the calendar as a meeting scheduled for the third Tuesday of each month, or every Wednesday, or every three months, Date Reminder will send reminders before each occurrence of the meeting. This even works if you use Date's ability to skip instances of a repeating date or add instances off of the usual sequence.

Normally, the reminders go the email address of the requesting user. Selected users can also be allowed to have reminders set to alternate email addresses. This allows a site administrator to, for example, send reminders for selected events to an email list.

Note that Date Reminder probably isn't appropriate for reminders a short time before an event. Sending of reminders is triggered by your site's cron run, so that limits how accurate the timing of the reminders can be. If your cron only runs hourly, it doesn't make sense to ask for a reminder 15 minutes before an event.

And note that reminders can only be requested by registered users, not anonymous users. Allowing that would raise too many security and administrative issues, so it isn't going to happen.

Configurability

There are a number of aspects of Date Reminder that the site administrator can control. This is a fairly complete list:

• Which node types allow reminders, and which date field (if there are several) in a type to use as the basis of reminders.
• Which (registered) users can request reminders.
• Which users can request reminders to arbitrary email addresses instead of their own.
• Which users can see or administer other users' reminders.
• Content of reminder messages.
• If and how long reminders should be kept after last date occurrence.
• The list of allowed lead times for reminders from which users can select.
• Where the reminder form is displayed:
  • In a tab at the top of the node display.
  • As an expandable field set in the node body itself.
  • As a separate block that can be placed where the site builder wants. (Useful when using Design Suite.) D7 only.

The page you're reading now is very new and incomplete. Instructions for configuring Date Reminder are still on the Date Reminder project page. Configuration instructions, especially dealing with Drupal 6 and 7 variations, will be migrated here as time permits. But for now, see the project page.