Setting up Groups Notifications

Organic Groups (OG) includes several modules, one of which is Organic Groups Notifications (OGN). By using the OGN module, you can allow your group members to receive notifications and subscribe to group content. OGN runs on Drupal’s messaging and notifications frameworks so you will need these modules as well, which brings me to the purpose of this article.  

The following guidance assumes you have installed and configured OG version 6.x-1.3. As of May 21, 2009, OG 6.x-1.3 was the recommended version of OG and OG 6.x-2.0-rc1 was flagged as support but not recommended. I chose OG 6.x-1.3. If you need help installing and configuring OG, see Setting Up Drupal Organic Groups.

Overview

In order to enable OGN, you need to perform three tasks.

1. Set Up Messaging
2. Set Up Tokens and Notifications
3. Set Up Organic Groups Notifications

Each step is discussed in more detail below.

Setup Up Messaging

When setting up messaging, I recommend you review the guidance found at http://drupal.org/node/252619. The steps below were derived from this page and are intended to summarize (simplify) the installation process.

1. Install and enable the Messaging module.
2. Enable Simple Mail if you want to use Drupal’s Mail API. Choose the method right for your installation.
3. If you want a messaging filter other than the one provided by the Messaging module (Messaging plain text), add an input filter by going to site configuration > input formats > add input filter. For more information on input filters, see http://drupal.org/node/252619.
4. Configure the Messaging module by going to the messaging setting page in the admin section. Read the information on the screen and make the decisions that are applicable to your needs.
5. Select the default send method. With simple mail, you have one option, mail.

Set Up Tokens and Notifications

The installation and configuration instructions for notifications can be found at http://drupal.org/node/252700. The steps below summarize what you need to do.
Note: According to the Notifications project page, “OG 6.x-1.2 and 1.3 will work with Notifications 6.x-1.1. For newer versions use the latest (either rc, beta or dev) or both.” My OG install is 6.x-1.3. Initial attempts to use 6.x-1.1 showed that the Notification API for subscriptions was not compatible with Drupal 6.10, so I installed Notifications 6.x-2.0.

1. Install and enable the Tokens module
2. Install and enable the Notifications module
3. Enable two notifications modules required by OGN:
1. Notifications lite module
2. Content Notifications module
4. Configure notifications (tip: be sure cron is running so that your messages go out or check the “Immediate sending” option)
5. Set permissions

There are several other Notifications modules that could be helpful. For example, Notifications UI defines which options will be visible for end users and how they'll be displayed.

Set Up OG Notifications

OG Notifications allows users to receive notifications and subscribe to group content. Now that you have Tokens, Messaging, and Notifications installed, you should have access to enable OGN via admin > site building > modules.

To change the configuration OG Messaging and Notifications go to admin > organic groups > organic groups configuration. Click on Messaging and Notifications and make any changes you need. Note that node event notifications can be configured via the messaging templates interface.

Conclusion

There are a lot of messaging and notification configuration options available. I recommend reading all the content on the messaging, notifications, and OG admin pages. Take your time, experiment. When I get a handle on my set up, I will make another post.