Include anonymous users in "e-mail" tab emails.
| Project: | Organic groups |
| Version: | 5.x-5.0 |
| Component: | og.module |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | gnat |
| Status: | active |
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This is probably way out of scope for the og.module, and might make more sense as a stand alone module, but I figured I would check if there was interest in this as a patch before making a module.
Anyway, I would like to extend the functionality of the e-mail tab. Currently it allows group admins to send mail to group subscribers. I would like to allow it to optionally (on a per group basis) allow people who are not subscribed to the group, or even anonymous users, to enter their email addresses and receive those mails. Group admins will be able to remove any or all of these email addresses, and users will be able to enter their address on a page, and unsubscribe from there.
The end result is a type of announce list for the group. This could be useful in several situations, but its a need I currently have for a specific site, ghostbikes.org. In my case, each city listed on the site is an OG. The goal is to have each city's individual project use the site for their project; this means making each group a mini site unto itself. In this use case, simplenews will not work because it is generalized for the whole site. I am proposing a sort of hybrid between simple news, and the e-mail tab for OG.
If this does become a module (which as I write this seems to make more and more sense), the biggest technical hurdle that I see is hooking in to the function that sends the email, and adding the additional users to the list of emails already generated by og.
#1
unless a better idea comes around, we could provide a hook so your module can take over the sending of these emails. then you can do your own query to get the OG subscribers and other interested emails. feel free to submit a patch.
#2
So my plan is to write most of this functionality into a module, and submit a patch to og.module so that they can play nicely together.
Will post a patch when I have one.
#3
I have started writing the code for this module, but have hit a giant problem that has nothing to do with coding logic. Mainly it has to do with naming and language. Thus far, I have been using the name "og_email_subscribe_" for all of my functions, and as the working name for the module.
However, there is some problem with the use of the term "subscribe". OG uses subscribe to indicate membership in an organic group. Simplenews, and other announce mailers use subscribe to indicate that an email address will receive messages.
My initial tendency, since this module is an extension of OG, is to leave the term "subscribe" behind to avoid confusion between subscribing to the group and signing up to receive the email tab emails. This leaves me with the question of what term to use instead, and I have yet to come up with anything good.
Also, is there some other language that is more commonly used to describe the E-mail tab and what it does? I keep describing them as "e-mail tab emails", is that sufficient?
#4
if someone made a patch to change the og terminology from 'subscribe' and 'subscriber' to 'member' and 'join' i would apply it.
#5
That patch to change 'subscribe' , 'subscriber' and 'subscription' to 'join', 'member' and 'membership' would also help the og_subscription module which aims to allow the subscription module to work together with the og module.
#6
gnat: are you already working on this patch for changing the og terminology?
#7
Anyone up for writing that terminology change patch? See #4.
#8
I am preparing this patch right now.
#9
I have posted the patch to change the nomenclature from subscribe/subscriber to join/member in a separate issue at #229037: Change from subscribe/subscriber to join/member.