Hi all, I am just wondering if anyone has an idea on how to send a notificaiton to all users when news items are posted? I need all users to be notified of news items posted regardless of whther they have signed up for it or not. I am trying to notify members that only sporadically check the site (ie: family members etc), and I only update every so often, so I need to send out a notice when the site has been updated, but I dont want to go in and email everyone every time I post. Makes it double the effort. It would be easier if they all just got a notice when the site was updated. I cant find anywhere to set each individual members notification options for each module, so I am wondering if I can create a hack that will send all users notification of only News items posted?

Sorry its long-winded.

Thanks!

PS. the reason I want to set this is because the family back in Oz arentt oo computer savvy. Even logging in is beyond them! So anything I can do to make it super simple stupid is worth the effort! I want this to be more than an online 'ooh-aaah' photo album you know?

Hello, I hope you get the family site up nicely. They will love it. I keep meaning to do the same after I slow down with the car club site. (meanwhile I slip a family pic on my other site to show the folks....)

I'm just thinking here so I have no specifics yet. It sounds like your audience may not even have logins, or only some do. Here's an idea, you create their accounts for them with whatever email address they use. They don't have to use the account until later on when they're comfortable. Anon access is enough for the usual content. The account is enough to notify them. Then a quick (but manual) SQL query can make some user config settings in one shot.

If someone doesn't come up with a better idea I might look at the database and see. It is a good idea to have standalone access to the database anyway for maintenance. A PHP front end like phpMyadmin is great, you can even use Access and the like if you can get local/VPN/SSH access.

perhaps one of these two would work just now till DonXoop does a hack assuming no massive family:)

To Make it easier for your users you could activate the global "notifications" block (if you have not seen this already) which you can make appear say "left", it has three default options for News:

Notify me when a new topic is created.
Notify me when any new story is submitted (awaiting approval).
Notify me when any new story is posted.

But in News "preferences" you can reduce this to one i.e.:

Notify me when any new story is posted.

All they then need to do is tick it and click "update"

You could also go to system admin/edit users and manually change each users notification method yourself to "e-mail"

Or:

If you are familiar with phpadmin/databases you can use the previous method to set up a news notification for your yourself, then go to the xoops_notifications table and "browse". You will see an example line for your notification method for news, the one with "new_story" in it.

Then insert another copy row's for each user, and just change the not_uid field to your user-id, you will find your user_id's by browsing the xoops_users table, look for the first "uid" field.

In the xoops_users table you will also see "notify_method" column, ensure this is "2" for email.

Doing it this way means you can hide the notification blocks.

Hi DonXoop and thanks for taking a look. If you are interested you can see the site here:

DJ73.com

If you need a login let me know.

I actually went through and setup all my family members with accounts manually, but like a squid I didnt keep a copy of the passwords, otherwsie I could go in as each user and set Notification options for each account manually or something.

I think it would be easier still though if there was some way to set it to default in the Notification options for all users to be notified of News posts.... I dont know. That way any new members (brave rellies from Ireland or Australia maybe!) will have it set to default when they sign up and they wont have to worry about setting it up as a preference.

Thanks JackJ for your suggestion. At this time I have the Notifications block set to the left hand side so it shows when logged in. I will try your idea of reducing the options to just the one, and see if that helps. But it get's back to the one thing I can't get them to do... log in! I think they think the International Online Evildoers and Hackers Society is watching them and will steal their identity or something... I dont know. (frusrating!)

I have access to phpmyadmin on my server, but I am waaaaaaay a newbie when it comes to mysql! Any advice or suggestions are gratefully appreciated. I am not too confident with editing line items and I am not sure if phpmyadmin allows it?

DJ