[TYPO3-dev] Email Notification - Cron or Hooks?

[Patrick Gaumond]

Gerrit Kamp wrote:
> It is an advanced email
> notification system with the following features:
> 
> - Users can indicate which type of events they want to be notified of
> through an FE screen. These events are fully configurable by a system admin,
> any DB change can trigger an event.
> 
> - A cron job runs in the background, checking every hour (or whatever
> timeframe you want) if any relevant event occurred and then it sends out
> emails to those users who wish to be notified.
> 
> - Configuration and testing of the events (the SQL to find the relevant
> events) is done separately through an FE screen.

First, great news. That's something worth investigating and even put in 
Core features if you ask me.

Let's call it T3NS - TYPO3 Notification Service.  ;)
(everybody like acronyms. No?)

 From a non-technical point of view, I see pros and cons for both 
approaches with cron vs. hooks.

Hooks: Emails/alert/logs are sent only when something *really* happen. 
On the down side, if the trigger is "update on a page" and your editor 
click "save" every 5 minutes you'll hate the T3NS.

Cron: Using the same scenario as above, the changelog gets cumulated and 
   sent only once. But you have to setup a cron job for that.

Is see it as a huge task just to provide a UI for editors/admins (I'm 
not even talking about coding the feature...). You'll need triggers for 
  new/edited/deleted elements (pages, tt_content, news item, etc). 
People will ask to be notified on stuff they have worked on.

You'll have to deal with errors in emails too.  ;)

And on a lighter note, a new internet word surfaces 4 days ago and is 
already sticking: bacn (pronounced Bacon).

Bacn is:
"Notifications you want. But not right now"

Sources: http://techburgh.com/blog/2007/08/18/what-is-bacn/
          http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/08/not-spam-but-ba.html

So maybe T3bacn is a better name for your system.  ;)

Patrick Gaumond