Please comment on how you are invoking email notifications, in general and for taxonomy subscriptions. Does anyone see a problem with workflow and drupal access model and/or 3rd party modules that supply that type of functionality?
With workflow, the natural point at which an announcement notification message should be sent is when the content changes to a certain workflow state -- e.g. "Posted". And the tools I see available for this task range from "send a tokenized email to a role" via the Token module (token_action.module) to the Subscriptions module.
I'd like to allow a full subscription suite, since blanket notifications by token_action will eventually spark subscribers to ask for a means to opt out, and since subscription to taxonomy terms is crucial. So it seems the best way is to adapt some sort of subscription module that's geared toward taxonomy and content types.
But it seems that workflow doesn't quite mesh with subscription and/or notifications modules. Workflow observes the drupal access model, and the eventual result after hooks and filters is a list of nodes the viewer is allow to see. In contrast, subscriptions triggers the notification based on the drupal core "Published" flag. BUT since workflow requires all nodes to be published in order to impose its access rules, the result is that subscriptions sends it's notifications immediately upon node creation, NOT at the point that a node is Viewable.
I'm very committed to Workflow for an application that allows users (it's a private site, so I refer to them as "subscribers") to create projects and upload files. Mine is setup like any app of this sort -- subscribers login, create new content, submit for approval (several approval levels, each by separate roles), and eventually the content is made visible to other subscribers. Finally, if a node is taken offline for some time then I wouldn't want it to be announced again on subsequent reposts.
It would be nice if Workflow could impose it's access rules without the published flag (is that drupal's key to imposing access hooks?), and have an action to change the published flag. (Would also be nice if could define an action to/from a single state rather than have to specify two distinct from/to states, but that's another conversation.) Alternately it would also be nice if subscriptions could be invoked by an action rather than only by the published flag.
(I'm sure there are lots of reason why/how, I'm just not yet very familiar with subscriptions and notifications.)
- Has this issue come up with anyone else, and how did you attack the problem?
- Is there another module that works well with workflow?
- Any consensus or opinions on a best approach?
Comments
Hi, I am running into a
Hi,
I am running into a similar problem. I think this ends up being a general Drupal issue. There is another module, modr8, that allows for simple moderation, and it has the same problem with subscriptions - either you get an email when the node is created, or not at all. At the core of the problem is that modr8 does not trigger an 'update' or 'publish' event when something is approved.
I was considering giving workflow a try using rules to trigger an email on state change. I would love to see an easy answer to making the following happen:
1. user creates content, invisible on site
2. moderator gets notified (i'm using rules)
3. moderator approves content, becomes visible on site
4. author gets notified (modr8 does that)
5. subscribers get notified of new content on site
I can get 1-4 using modr8, but #3 is not a trigger for rules, so #5 does not work; also as you mentioned, there is no unsubscribe framework for such notifications, which is an issue.
In my dream world, there would be a way to add more actions in the "events" tab of Notifications (by default: updated, created, comment added. It would be great to have: approved by moderator?, or switched to state xyz). And modr8 would actually trigger those.
Revisioning + Workflow?
Hi,
Don't want to blow my own trumpet, but do want to help you out.
Revisioning has triggers and actions for these sort of things. Versions of 16-Dec-09 and later also feature a Rules interface with conditions, events and actions that may be of use when sending notifications.
The tutorials on the Revisioning project page explain how Revisioning and Workflow can be used together to create flexible content moderation and publication workflows.
subscribe
Has there been any progress on this? I am looking at some similar functionality as well. I am trying to set up a site where users are notified of items they are subscribed to periodically.