Investigate subscription / notification solutions

Messaging and Notifications is the most complete framework for this. I'd highly recommend that this be the first one looked at. I've some future plans to do something here myself, so am interested if anyone has worked with these too.

@sirkitree: My perception is that messaging and notifications is the not best way to setup email upon flagging. Flag is very extensible because of its integrations with actions. Actions is designed to enable features such as this; for instance, there is a 'send an email' action. Both solutions rely on token for constructing the emails. Then finally, you need an engine that integrates flag with actions to queue the emails. I believe rules is a better engine than notifications or trigger to build and send messages to lists of users.

There are two caveats: #329500: support for looping and data lists in rules module and #298109: Rules integration in flag.

IMO the future of this issue is either to be marked as Documentation for whichever module(s) people use to get this done or as a duplicate of rules integration with flag.

Notifications may not be the best way to do this... under a certain context. If a site is already utilizing Messaging/Notifications rather then Actions, it is. If a site has a lot of traffic and sends a lot of emails, it is. I pointed out in my last comment that it is the most complete framework for this solution, maybe not always the best. If your site has small traffic, and you want to send emails one at a time, use Actions/Rules. But if you send a crap load of emails, it's very important to be able to queue those emails and send them together. M&N also gives the ability for digests.

I'll also point out that I plan on looking into implementing this myself as my team and I do use M&N and not Actions/Rules. I don't mean to pull any development efforts that are already going into #298109: Rules integration, but it is not in my best interest (nor d.o's) to go that particular route. This is not a matter of opinion, rather a fact from a performance perspective.

@sirkitree: From what I gather, you're saying the tasks of queueing messages and digests would be better left to M&N for the sake of performance & the easy upgrade path for existing M&N users. Here goes me trying to sway you again. :)

The alternative here is to use Actions API for integrating messaging frameworks (it can already do email, sms, flag_friend, xmpp [ambiguous on project page], create a node which can trigger more actions, etc [basically it's a worthy competitor to Messaging]), the hottest new module on the block, Flag, and, for the cherry on top, generating the batch list of emails and users using Views in Rules.

As per Notifications Framework v. Rules: Rules integrates with core and contrib actions in many ways, but importantly for this case, cck and token; and it provides a reliable means to schedule and perform actions (messaging). Rules is pretty mature and a reasonable candidate to replace the Notifications module. I realize it's continuing to grow quickly, but I haven't seen any posts suggesting that it wouldn't be able to scale.

The functionality won't change very much either; but the improvements will be much more abstract. The upgrade path wouldn't be too hard; and Moofie is so close to a working solution for #5, as well as, project module's messaging with: RTBC #298109: Rules integration and code needs review #329500: support for looping and data lists, where Fago is also an active participant. The last unaddressed component would be a user's digest ui; rules can cover admin configurations.

For a summary/ digest of all the updates all the nodes that have been flagged, will rules be suitable for it?

I was thinking of sending a digest every 24 hours to update the user instead of updating the user multiple times a day for each and every change.

Thanks.

@Jkello: I like that design. I would prefer that for nodes I subscribe to but don't maintain.

The way to do this with rules would be to set up a view with a user's digest for 24 hrs, then you would schedule a rule that loops over the users and sends their digest using the system email action.

There's been a little more progress on this conversation. Out of it has come two tasks (which I will separate as feature requests here)

1) We need to write an action for sending email to everyone who flagged an issue node, the entire issue queue, or site-wide.
2) We need to write a configurable action for executing a given flag so that it can be added to the Trigger: After saving a new comment.

@Mitchell - I've been swayed ;)

3) how about creating a hook, which let the site also send out emails about other nodes which are nodereferenced to/from ?

1) We need to write an action for sending email to everyone who flagged an issue node, the entire issue queue, or site-wide.

That's exactly what i'm looking for !! Any solution yet?

The best would be to use the messaging module power for the email or may be something with views mail...

Awesome module otherwise!