As of today, notify.module is officially obsoleted and will not be supported.

See the announcement on the module home page:

notify.module is discontinued and will no longer be supported. Use subscriptions.module instead, as well as trigger and action modules which is part of Drupal 6 core.

All of the feature requests filed against notify.module are already beautifully implemented in subscriptions.module, as well as much, much more. Subscriptions.module is ideal for user notification of new content.

For those who were looking for a leightweight module to notify the administrator of new content on the site (e.g. content to be moderated before publication), you can use the trigger and action modules which are part of Drupal 6 core.

Do you see any reason why notify.module should note be obsoleted?
What function could notify module perform, that is not already performed (better) by either one of those modules: subscriptions, trigger, action?

Comments

beginner’s picture

beginner commented

make that "lightweight" and "should NOT be obsoleted".
Please excuse any other spelling mistake, too. :-/

matt2000’s picture

matt2000 commented

I find subscription module unnecessarily complex.

And I'm almost finished (in testing) with a 'notify_by_views' module for 5x that extends notify to allow content to be selected per user based on Views, providing much of the functionality of subscription module, without the need to write sub-modules, using the Views interface we already know.

Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with actions & triggers yet. And I could fairly easily remove the dependency on notify from notify_by_views when I upgrade to 6x. It doesn't use much anyway, except plugging into the existing settings forms.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

I use notify _and_ subscriptions on my sites. Notify is nice because it's just one setting and you get notified of any changes to the site. That's great for sites that aren't updated often. I haven't dug into subscriptions a lot but I don't remember seeing any way to subscribe to everything all in one shot. I don't have any sites on D6, yet, so I know very little about triggers and actions.

That said, if you don't want to continue it no one is going to force you. You could always put it up for adoption. :)

Michelle

beginner’s picture

beginner commented

Thanks both for the feedback.

About subscriptions being too heavy, if I were to implement all the feature requests that are on this module's issue queue, notify wouldn't be lightweight either... And it would be silly to replicate the functionality.

That's why I thought about making notify a very lightweight module for site administrators only (for sites with little traffic), but then D6 has this functionality inbuilt with triggers and action. For D5, notify still exists.

It's not that I don't want to maintain it. It's that I really don't see its specificity compared to other existing D6 modules. If I have to make a D6 release, I need to know that it could do that no other module does.

Is notify_by_views hosted here? I couldn't find it. I've never used views, so far. As far a dependencies go, depending on the feature you need, exactly, there is a host of very fine module in D6 that could be used (mail.module, action.module, subscriptions, etc.)

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

If D6 has an easy way for users to say "Email me whenever something is added" then I, personally, don't need notify for D6. That was all I used it for. My family isn't big on checking my website to see if I've posted anything so it's nice for them to just tell the website to let them know when there's a change.

Michelle

beginner’s picture

beginner commented

Since you already use subscriptions, you can have the users subscribe to all node types.
If one needs a very simple, minimalistic interface, maybe the best would be to add a contrib module to subscriptions which would add a single check box somewhere in the user profile, and automatically subscribe the user to all node types (i.e. the UI would be different, much simpler, but the result would be the same).

Another solution that i am also considering is to do a straight upgrade of notify to D6, but then veto all feature requests, redirecting people to the other modules.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Putting subscriptions on my site would really be overkill. It's a simple family blog. I'd love a straight upgrade. For more advanced notifying, subscriptions / notifications is there. As far as I'm concerned, all "notify" needs to be is a very simple UI that allows users to check a box to be notified when nodes/comments are posted to the site.

Michelle

matt2000’s picture

matt2000 commented

Another solution that i am also considering is to do a straight upgrade of notify to D6, but then veto all feature requests

This would be great, though while you're doing the upgrade, you could add a simple hook into the mailing function for specifying what nodes get included in the mailing. One more hook to override sending to the given user entirely, and you've got your own extensible framework that's lighter than Subscription. For future requests, you can tell people, 'write your own.' I suspect these 2 hooks would cover most needs for simple node notification.

matt2000’s picture

matt2000 commented

notify_by_views is still being developed. Here's a functional but relatively untested beta:

http://mattchapmanproductions.com/notify_by_views-0.5-dev.tgz

It should make it to d.o once I get my CVS account.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Account approved. :)

Michelle

drein’s picture

drein commented

Why all modules that I'm using become unsupported?
It's incredible!
Anyway, not all people can update to d6, due to some modules that are unsupported or not updated.
Anyway, I think notify is really good, the unique thing are missing is the capability for the admin to select which types of contents users can be notified.
Subscriptions probably is good, but it has lots of options and not all users are able to manage it properly.
Bye.

teradome’s picture

teradome commented

Agreed.

Essentially, I need RSS alerts digested into email, emailed to users every few days.
It's an intranet, and it's not an optional mailing.

Notify worked nearly perfectly for that... Subscriptions is just too damned complicated, and doesn't give me good admin control over others' subscriptions (won't let user 1 set other user's settings from /user/#, won't do batch-update of users when global settings are changed, etc. etc.).

teradome’s picture

teradome commented
rkdesantos’s picture

rkdesantos commented

While moving to Subscriptions might make sense for me eventually, I concur that the simple straight-forward choice of Notify is very convenient. I'm learning actions and triggers but frankly, it is more complex than most users need. Keep Notify as suggested in #8 and let those of us who, because of other or custom modules might not move to D6 for another 6 to 12 months. Bug fixes matter more to me than new features, particularly if Subscriptions/Actions/Triggers provides those anyway. A continued Notify with bug fixes would make the transition to D6 much easier.

rkdesantos’s picture

rkdesantos commented

Any feedback to these comments, beginner?

matt2000’s picture

matt2000 commented

Notify by Views is now maintained on Drupal.org :

http://drupal.org/project/notify_by_views

matt2000’s picture

matt2000 commented
Assigned: Unassigned » matt2000
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Notify module has been adopted & un-obsoleted. :-)