Question2Answer Plugin: On-Site-Notifications

Description

Stackoverflow-like notifications on your Question2Answer forum that can replace all email-notifications.

Features

• users get notifications about the following events: incoming answer, incoming comment, question was up- or downvoted, answer was up- or downvoted, answer got selected as best, incoming private message
• yellow notify bubble on top next to the username
• easy to use for all your users
• notification box shows new events and also events of last 100 days (specify days in plugin options)
• notifies on: incoming answer, incoming comment, best answers and upvotes
• lightweight plugin that does not need any extra server resources
• available languages: de, en, fr, lt

Installation

Follow these steps:

• Download the plugin as ZIP from github.
• Make a full backup of your q2a database before installing the plugin.
• Extract the folder q2apro-on-site-notifications from the ZIP file.
• Move the folder q2apro-on-site-notifications to the qa-plugin folder of your Q2A installation.
• Use your FTP-Client to upload the folder q2apro-on-site-notifications into the qa-plugin folder of your server.
• Navigate to your site, go to Admin -> Plugins and check if the plugin "On-Site-Notifications" is listed.
• Change the plugin options if you like.
• Congratulations, your new plugin has been activated!

For developers

It is possible to generate custom notifications from other plugins that will be displayed in the notification list. To do so, an event needs to be fired with the q2apro_osn_plugin event id and with the following parameters:

• plugin_id: ID of the plugin that generated the event. It is not used by the notifications plugin but it is added to the table in case an efficient query needs to be run against the table that contains the plugin notifications
• user_id: The user ID that will receive the notification
• event_text: The raw HTML that will be displayed as the notification
• icon_class: A CSS class that must be present in every request that could display the notification

qa_report_event('q2apro_osn_plugin', qa_get_logged_in_userid(), qa_get_logged_in_handle(), null, array(
    'plugin_id' => 'my_plugin_id',
    'user_id' => $receiverUserId,
    'event_text' => '<a href="http://site.com/user/user1">user1</a> mentioned you in <a href="http://site.com/154">this post</a>',
    'icon_class' => 'my_plugin_id_and_css_class',
));

Disclaimer

The code is probably okay for production environments, but may not work exactly as expected. You bear the risk.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Copyright

All code herein is OpenSource. Feel free to build upon it and share with the world.