Social PWA

The Social Progressive Web App module brings exciting new features to your Open Social community!

Push notifications

This module provides your community members with the ability to receive notifications in their browser about important community activities. By clicking the notification, the member will be taken immediately to the action. They don’t even have to be on the page!

Users are prompted one time to enable push notifications after their first login. Of course, users can always choose to enable or disable the notifications on their settings page.

Homescreen

The homescreen functionality allows users to add the community website to the home screen of their devices. This way, your website will show up as a native app. Users will have direct access and can easily enter the community.

The user may even receive a prompt to add the community website as an app if their browser supports it.

Requirements

In order to install and use the Social Progressive Web App module the following requirements are necessary:

• Open Social distribution
• A website with a valid SSL certificate
• PHP 7.3 or higher
• PHP GMP extension enabled
• PHP Multibyte String extension enabled
• OpenSSL
• cURL

If you do not use Composer to install this module you will also have to run the following commands:

composer require "minishlink/web-push ^2.0"
composer require "piwik/device-detector ^3.0"

Installation and configuration

When you meet the requirements mentioned above, you can simply enable the module and configure it at /admin/config/system/pwa.

On the configuration page, you will have to set the site (short)name and provide an image. The image is used on the home screen and in the push notifications.

Considerations

It's good to note that not all browsers and devices support Service Workers or push notifications. A notable exception is the Safari browser for MacOS and iOS, which does not yet support push notifications (Service Workers are supported as of Safari 11.1). See the current implementation status for all the major browsers at https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready.

Turning this module off may result in the inability to unregister the Service Worker. There are plans to mitigate this by implementing a default Service Worker in Drupal Core, but this has not been completed yet.

Please test this module carefully before deploying it in your production environment.