Integration with subscription module [#197658]

I would very much like to see an integration of og subscriptions with the subscription module. Currently I am having those two modules running side-by-side but this is unsatisfactory.

Integrating with the subscription module would also solve some current shortcomings of how og handles subscriptions. For example currently og sends out multiple emails for the same post if the post is published to several groups and a user is subscribed to several of those groups.

The new subscription module has been written with the goal in mind to make it easy for other modules to provide plugins. It would be nice to put this to a test. I have seen from post by Moshe elsewhere that he is considering doing this. Moshe, do you want to comment?

Comments

Comment #1

moshe weitzman commented 4 December 2007 at 14:43

OG doesn't do that multiple mailing thing in the 5.4 releases.

Subscription module integration is interesting though the fundamental issues are around UI and subscriptions has not at all figured that out yet.

Comment #2

gustav commented 4 December 2007 at 15:45

It is good to know that the multiple mailing problem has been fixed in 5.4. I should have noticed. Thanks.

Regarding the UI for subscriptions: I think the plugin can decide what user interface to provide for group subscriptions. It could be the same that OG currently provides. The subscription module would only be used to handle the queing and mailing and in particular to make sure that a user who has subscribed to the same content in different ways (and there are many: by taxonomy, by user, by content type, by node, by group) gets it sent only once.

Comment #3

gustav commented 20 January 2008 at 16:38

Version:

5.x-4.1

» 5.x-5.0

If any developer would appreciate a small amount of sponsoring to develop a plug-in for the subscription module to handle subscriptions to organic groups then please contact me via my contact form.

Moving the handling of OG notification emails to the subscription module makes sense because:
1) It avoids code duplication
2) The subscription module has a digest function
3) The subscription module allows users to subscribe also to individual posts, taxonomy terms, users, ...

The user interface for how users can currently subscribe to OG notification emails should remain. It should however be extended by a tab on the page that the subscription module provides for users to manage their subscriptions.

Details of how to best do this should be discussed in the corresponding thread in the issue tracker for the subscription module at http://drupal.org/node/212248

Comment #4

gustav commented 25 January 2008 at 08:47

Good news: develCuy is going to implement the subscriptions_og module that will provide an og plugin for the subscriptions module. The specifications for the module are at http://develcuy.elblog.de/subscriptions_og/

Moshe: I would very much like to make sure that we implement the integration with the subscriptions module in such a way that you would be tempted to consider in future to drop the built-in support for notifications in og and move to using the subscriptions_og module for that purpose. Could you take a look at our current specifications please and see if you would like to suggest some modifications?

Comment #5

moshe weitzman commented 25 January 2008 at 14:40

i read the detailed specs. thanks for that.

my biggest worry is with the end user UI for subscriptions module. I don't want to impose ugliness upon the users of og just so they can get what they already have. the end user UI for subscriptions module is a really hard problem. but until it is solved, i hesitate to integrate. there are a lot of choices offerred and they are occassionally useful (subscribe to all posts by salvis. subscribe to all posts in term 'og') but the average user might cringe at the choices. i looked at subscriptions a while ago and it might be better now. last i saw there was a large nasty fieldset at the bottom of each node detail view.

for now, i like your approach of taking over mailings as a separate module. note that og2list takes over mailing too, and this can be done with a hook today - no further changes are needed in og. still, i bet you will want some UI changes and i will help make those happen. and i share the same long term goal of wanting to replace og mailing functionality with subscriptions.

Comment #6

moshe weitzman commented 26 January 2008 at 21:27

i just tried out the modules described at http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/jan/23/keeping-people-posted-no... and i am very impressed. i think that may be a stronger horse to jump on than subscriptions.

Comment #7

gustav commented 26 January 2008 at 23:46

Moshe, I just had a look at the notifications module as well. I could however not see any advantages over the subscriptions module. The notifications module is also a rewrite of the old subscriptions module with exactly the same aim of creating a framework that allows the development of plugins for different notification types. But it seems less advanced than the subscriptions module.

I can understand that you dislike the subscriptions fieldset that the subscriptions module provides on node pages. It can be confusing to the user when it shows too many subscription options. However the only reason why the notifications module does not have that problem is that it does not yet show any subscriptions options on the node page. It does show them on the node edit form and there it looks no better than that of the subscriptions module. Furthermore in the subscriptions module I have better control over what subscription options I want to show to the user.

I am also a bit surprised by the way in which the developers of the notification module must have been working on their module while the rewriting of the subscriptions module was going on. Why did they not communicate with the subscriptions module developers or start a discussions in the subscriptions module issue queue about why they wanted to fork the module. Do you understand the motivation behind that?

Comment #8

rconstantine commented 28 January 2008 at 23:54

Well, there seem to be a host of choices that have sprung up in the last month or so. As I mention in the thread linked to in #6, I'd like to throw in with one camp or the other and help out, but would like to see the developers of each better delineate their features and virtues compared to their alternatives.