Messaging and Notifications frameworks

Overview

Messaging and Notifications are two complete frameworks for handling subscriptions, notifications about site events, or simply sending out messages using any kind of delivery method. The goal of this presentation is to show the new developments we've been building on top of these frameworks and the new and exciting possibilities that have happened in just the past couple of months since the first beta was introduced at DrupalCon Boston.

Background

Your Drupal site is generating all kinds of mail for all kinds of reasons: You have giant announcement list, a few dozen group discussions, automated content notifications, send-to-friend messages, petitions and postcards.
Now there is the Messaging framework that attempts to abstract all the needs of other modules regarding the sending of user messages, adding also a centralized way to manage all your message templates, filtering, and delivery settings. The Messaging framework accepts different kinds of plug-ins for different sending methods, like different email modules (mimemail, phpmailer), SMS, web notifications, etc..
The Notifications framework, which in turn uses Messaging as the delivery layer, attempts to simplify building subscriptions-like systems in Drupal. It is a collection of modules that provide a core set of notification types and developers API for building specialized user interfaces, use multiple message delivery methods (including email, sms and IM) and developing custom subscription types.

Agenda

* Moving beyond 'e-mail only'; let the users decide how to interact with your site.
* Enabling round-trip email discussions for any content type or topic
* The Messaging Framework - More than just email, IM & SMS plugins.
* Building on the Messaging framework: free message templating and sending for other modules
* Extending the framework with your own modules or distribution types
* Notifications modules - How to configure & use subscriptions and notifications.
* Integration example: Organic Groups now using the Notifications framework
* Real life usage: Some examples of live sites using this solution.

Goals

* Show you we can move beyond the mail only paradigm to sending and receiving messages through different methods.
* Raise awareness about new and exciting possibilities for user interaction or why just sending emails is not enough nowadays.
* Let other developers know how they can build on this framework and abstract message sending from their modules.
* Overview for site builders of how to set up a full featured subscriptions/notifications solution
* Present the latest developments built on these two frameworks and some new plug-in modules

Resources

http://drupal.org/project/messaging
http://drupal.org/project/notifications
http://www.developmentseed.org/tags/messaging