Date Reminder

Overview

Date Reminder allows a registered user to request an email reminder to be sent at a specified time before an event. Generally these would be calendar events, but any node type that has a CCK datetime can support reminders.

Features

• When reminders are enabled for a node, registered users (with the appropriate privilege) can request reminders to be sent before each occurrence of the date/time. The user specifies how long before the date/time to send the reminder.
• When reminders are enabled for a node type, anyone who can edit the node can enable or disable reminders for that node.
• Reminders are sent using the Messaging system. The usual reminder method is email, but other messaging transports should work. (Well, not Drupal 7. The Drupal 7 version just uses straight email.)
• System administrator can control:
  • Which node types allow reminders, and which date field (if there are several) in a type to use as the basis of reminders.
  • Which (registered) users can request reminders.
  • Which users can request reminders to arbitrary email addresses instead of their own.
  • Which users can see or administer other users' reminders.
  • Content of reminder messages.
  • If and how long reminders should be kept after last date occurrence.
  • The list of allowed lead times for reminders from which users can select.

An effort is under way to move much of the documentation here to the Date Reminder section of the Site Builders Guide. Currently that document is very incomplete, but watch there. Information on this module page will gradually be moving there.

Screenshots

Configuring Date Reminder

Requesting a Reminder

List all reminders

Known issues

• If you use one of the administrator options to delete a group of reminders, there isn't any kind of "Are you sure you want to do that?" verification. There should be.
• Reminders won't work well if the requested "lead time" is less than the cron period, especially less than half the cron period. If cron runs infrequently on your site you'll probably want to remove the options for short remind times.
• Reminders are explicitly not allowed for anonymous users. Sorry, there's no intention to change that.

Administration and Use

This probably should be on a separate documentation page, but for now...

To set up Date Reminder:

• Make sure you have cron running on your site. It's essential for proper operation of Date Reminder. Cron is usually set up through your ISP, but Poormanscron is another option.
• Install and enable Date Reminder in the usual way.
• Go to Administer>Settings>Date reminder. (.../admin/config/people/datereminder in D7). There are four settings you can control:
  • Cron frequency. Tell the module how often cron runs. This fine-tunes when reminders are actually sent. (Running cron infrequently reduces overhead on your site, but reduces the accuracy of time when reminders are sent. If cron only runs every two hours, don't ask for reminders 10 minutes before an event.)
  • Max reminders. A user can request multiple reminders at different
    times for the same event. Specify the maximum number of reminders
    one user can schedule for a node. (A user might want a reminder,
    say, a week before an event, a day before AND a couple of hours
    before.)
  • How many new reminders a user can add at one time. (New feature in 6.x-1.1.)
  • How long are reminders kept after the last occurrence of a repeating date? If the node's date is changed during this retention time, users' reminders will still be active.
  • Are the user's reminders displayed on each node as a tab or as
    an expandable field set in the node listing?
  • You can also configure the values that will be displayed as allowed
    lead times for reminders. Keep in mind that lead times shorter than
    your cron frequency won't work.
• Configure permissions. You can configure permission to:
  • Administer reminders.
  • Request reminders. (Users must be registered.)
  • See (but not change) other users' reminders.
  • Send a reminder to an arbitrary email address instead of the user's normal one.
• Configure message templates. Go to Notifications>Message templates>Reminder message. You can customize the subject and message body for reminder emails. Use tokens. (This is different on Drupal 7. See notes below. Message configuration in D7 is under .../admin/config/people/datereminder.)
• Enable reminders for content types. Go to Administer>Content management>Content types and edit the content type. (Content type administration is under .../admin/structure/types in D7.)
• Note: A content type must have at least one Date-type field or you won't even see the option to enable reminders.
• Enable reminders for one or more nodes. Edit a node, and you'll see an expandable block to enable reminders for the node. ("Node" being the technical term for a content item.)
• Once reminders are enabled for a node, users can ask to receive reminders for that node.

Date Reminder and Drupal 7

The "official" Drupal 7 release of Date Reminder has been out for a while now. It's substantially the same as the Drupal 6 version. The administration has moved around to fit more into the Drupal 7 administration conventions. I hope the above notes make it all clear.

One big difference with the Drupal 7 version: It no longer uses Messaging to send email, just the standard Drupal mailer. That means no support for all of the other features of Messaging, but Messaging seems to be only partly functional for D7. Maybe in the future if Messaging becomes fully supported....

Date Reminder and Rules

Date Reminder has some minimal support for Rules. This allows a site administrator do a few things like add or remove reminders when some rules event occurs. For example, you could automatically add a reminder when a new node is created. For more information, see Date Reminder and Rules.

Date Reminder and Anonymous (or Not Logged-in) Users

This issue comes up from time to time, so I decided it was worth addressing it here. Date Reminder only works with registered, logged-in users. Reminder records are tied to a user account, and if a user isn't logged in, there is no user record. While I could see allowing an anonymous user to submit a request, there would be no way for a user to come back later and list or change a reminder request.

I don't want to deal with the administration hassles and potential opportunity for abuse that allowing anonymous registrations would create.

But then, there was enough interest in this feature that another developer took it on themselves to fork the Date Reminder code and add anonymous user support. Not having tried it, I can't vouch for it, but if you really want reminders for anonymous users, I suggest you take a look at Anonymous Date Reminder. A caveat, though. Anonymous Date Reminder is incompatible with Date Reminder. Apparently that module creates conflicting registrations for menu and other url paths, so the two modules cannot work together. That at least is true for the 7.x-1.1 release, the only one that exists as I write this.