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

[Gerrit Kamp]

Patrick, thanks for your response.
 
>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.
 
I think I will stick to cron for the time being. That is how it already
works for my current project, and I really like the fact that it is
independent of what users do. I never used cron myself before, but with a
good online tutorial, I had it setup in 30 minutes (not on shared but on
dedicated hosting I have to admit).
 
>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.
 
My idea is to make an Admin FE UI in which certain events and responses are
defined. This UI contains for each notification type:
-        Text input, SQL: definition of an event
-        Text input, HTML: message with ###markers### for the SELECT fields
-        Text input, SQL: conditions for which users should get the message
(the main condition is of course that the FE user has indicated he/she WANTS
to be notified)
-        button to test (no emails will be sent, but a result screen shows
which events are selected by the SQL, what the message will look like, and
to which users it would have been sent)
-        button to switch the notification on or off
 
Is rather straightforward.
 
The most difficult thing for admins is therefore to create the SQL for the
notifications. This is indeed slightly more complex than to offer a
selection of some tables and some events (update etc), but it makes the
extension much more flexible. For my current project, I select for example
that only Owners and Co-owners of certain records should be notified on
record changes, which is already a very customized SQL select query.
 
>You'll have to deal with errors in emails too.  ;)
What do you mean? Emails to wrong addresses that get bounced?
 
>Bacn is:
>"Notifications you want. But not right now"
 
This seems to be something that FE users should worry about, don't see how I
can incorporate it into the extension, right?
 
Gerrit