By skor on

I'm interested in giving some of my less adventurous users the option to subscribe via email and I see two modules here and here that provide this function. Both seem to be in active development for drupal 4.7.

Any advice on the relative strengths or weaknesses would be appreciated. I'm also considering the new feedburner email service

Thanks
Sean

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

marknewlyn’s picture

marknewlyn commented

Hi Sean

Same boat as you. Need the functionality and not sure which to use. I had a little look though and I am leaning towards using Subscription NOT Subscriptions because I think its more flexible. You can define your own channels and things. I didn't get that impression from the second one.

I am no expert though and hopefully my bad advice will trigger an expert to step in ;)

Cheers

Mark

skor’s picture

skor commented

I'll probably try both on my development site. The feedback here might only dictate which I try first.

In the end, I may actually go with the feedburner solution (at least to start). I hate to send users to another site, but the extra hastle and the feedburner combinded email/rss package might actually spur the less tech savy users to move to RSS.

Sean

brashquido’s picture

brashquido commented

I've also looked at this in some depth, but looked at notify, subscription and subscriptions. I found notify to simplistic with no ability to subscribe to specific content or threads, and I found subscription way too complex for what my userbase would be willing to use. Subscriptions was the closest to what I was after and definately had all the functionality you want in a simple (but powerful) notification/subscription system, but I found that there were still a few issues mainly with the UI which I discussed here. In a nutshell these issues were;

1) There should be an option to have the link to the subscriptions module placed under the "my account" area for each user rather than taking up a menu space in the navigation menu. I think logically this is a better place to access and set user specific settings.

2) The subscriptions module allows you to subscribe to content at the taxonomy and node level. If your users simply want to subscribe to all forum posts, or all articles and you have a large taxonomy, then that user is currently required to subscribe to every single taxonomy for that given content type (forum, book, story, etc) which is cumbersome. If there was a Global subscription level that allowed you to subscribe to all nodes published under a particular content type, then this process would be extremely simplified. You'd end up with a subscription hierarchy like this;

Global
Any content under a particular content type

Category
Any content published under a particular taxonomy term

Thread
Any content posted under a particular node

3) As you taxonomy and node subscriptions grow, the subscriptions management page for the user becomes cluttered very quickly. I think it would be much easier for users to manage their subscriptions if their subscriptions page was broken up into three sub pages to manage Global (content type), Category (taxonomy) and Thread (node) subscriptions seperately.

4) Currently when you subscribe/unsubscribe from a taxonomy/node you click on a link which then requires a page refresh. This is cumbersome and slow if you are wanting to subscribe/unsubscribe to several taxonomies/nodes at once. I think it would be much easier to manage if this was replaced with a checkbox system where you made all you selections and then clicked a submit button once when you were finished.

I've offered to sponsor these features, but have not heard back from the author as yet. If either of you guys think my proposal would fill your requirements too, then I would really appreciate some help on the financial side with hiring a dev to implement this as there are a few sponsored module modifications I am looking at in my migration to Drupal and only limited funds.
----------------
Dominic Ryan
www.it-hq.org

skor’s picture

skor commented

I'm probably not going to be much help on the financial end, since I'm doing this on a volunteer basis for my church. I'd be more likely to hack around and see if I could get it working on my own, but I suspect it will be a low priority for me, so it won't be any time soon.

Thanks again.
Sean

don@robertson.net.nz’s picture

don@robertson.net.nz commented

I do not see how users subscribe to a taxonomy using Subscriptions. Are 'Categories' the same as 'Taxonomies' or do I need one of hte Taxonomy modules?

Don Robertson
Systems Administrator
Hun Sen Library
Royal University of Phnom Penh
don@robertson.net.nz 012 769 280

Don Robertson
Christchurch, New Zealand
don@robertson.net.nz
021 294 1542

karldied’s picture

karldied commented

Thanks for the discussion; I've installed subscriptions.

The taxonomy module has the confusing attribute of using the sub-menu "categories" in the admin menu. It is even more confusing if you've installed the categories module which creates a second sub-menu "categories" in the admin menu. If your browser shows the URL on mouse roll-over, you'll see the taxonomy "categories" sub-menu come up as www.example.com/drupal?q=admin/taxonomy (or similar, depending on drupal folder and clean URLs settings).

Remember also to set 'admin > access control' and 'admin > settings > subscriptions'

brakai295’s picture

brakai295 commented

Has anyone experienced problems with the Subscriptions module not sending out emails?

I don't know what to do?!?! It just doesn't want to send out any emails. Is there anything I can do/change to check what's going on???

Webdesign Melbourne Australia
www.brizk.com

timatlee’s picture

timatlee commented

I'm having a problem where it will not send out an email on new content (even though I have subscribed to the category and the node type in question), however it will send an email if a comment is made (subscriptions set for the category, but NOT the node).

Has your issue been resolved in the month or so since the post was made?