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Hi All

I’m trying to work out whether EE would be the right tool for a possible job. Ideally this would be on EE2.x.

Required: I need a way for members to be able to subscribe to one or more categories, and recieve an email when a new entry is posted in that category. That could be an immediate notification, or it could be a cron job called once a day that would check for new entries and notify the relevant members (either as separate emails for each entry or perhaps as a daily “digest” of new entries that relate that member).

Would be nice: Ideally I’d also like to let members’ notification preferences relate to custom fields too: so, on an events site, they could get an alert when there’s a new event posted that is in category A, B or C and is also in town X, or they might want to know about all events in category D or E which are priced between £10 and £20. So basically the kind of filtering you can do with Solspace Super Search, but done automatically and emailed to the member.

Does anyone know of a good approach to this? I’m guessing that to do all of this would mean building a custom module/extension, but if the “required” bit above would be possible with existing stuff we might just keep it simple. Any pointers would be gratefully recieved!

Thanks, Frank

Ever find an answer?

I’ve been looking for a way to get that functionality as well. It appears that there were numerous EMail notification plugins available for EE1.x, but none of them seem to have been updated 2.x. And EE already has basic functionality for EMail updates, but it’s only available for channels (and not categories) - here’s hoping that gets addressed in an update, along with giving users the option to subscribe/unsubscribe (tying that into the mailing list functionality would seem to be the obvious way to go).

So far, the simplest workable solution I’ve found is to use RSS along with an RSS-to-EMail notification service. In a nutshell, that involved building an RSS template for the channels/categories for which notifications will be sent out - then embedding a “subscribe” form (from the RSS-to-EMail service) in the public page. I ended up using feedmyinbox.com, since it was the only one I could find that allows subscribing for updates without having to create an account. They just enter their EMail address, and the subscribe form has a hidden field with the URL to the RSS feed.

That does have its limitations, though: mainly that you can’t manage the subscriptions through the EE dashboard (though you can register a site with feedmyinbox.com & manage subscriptions there). There’s also no way for EE to tell whether not a user is already subscribed, and the only simple way to unsubscribe is via the links in the notification EMails.

No - I ended up telling the client this wasn’t possible. But good to know there are some workarounds.

I agree - a plugin to do this would be v useful!

Hi Justred - I don’t suppose you found any RSS-to-email services that will handle secure RSS feeds? (ie http authentication). I’m realising this may be the only option for what I need for a site I’m working on too.

Hi Sophie,

Unfortunately, no. You *might* be able to do it by putting the username & password in the URL (like http://user:[email protected]/index.php/rss-feed/), though I haven’t tried it.

The site where I need this functionality is in the same boat (members/invite-only site), so I ended up making the RSS feed public (with a fairly obscure URL) & setup the template so that the RSS feed just includes the title & link. So that way, there’s no private content published in the RSS feed.

Just title + link probably isn’t a bad solution. Members’ posts are moderated, so we could check there was nothing sensitive in the titles. It would also let any more savvy members use an RSS reader instead, which might be handy. I will discuss it with the client - they may decide even titles are too sensitive for a public feed.

I was thinking of using MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email system, as that would neatly combine with a more general mailing list solution and gives us subscribe/unsubscribe etc… You can also control frequency so I could use it for both a daily and weekly digest option.

I’ve also used Feedburner for RSS by email subscriptions in the past, if anyone else is looking for this kind of solution.

Thanks, always good to have options.

It would also be fairly simple to use some semi-harcoded text for the post titles in the RSS feed/template - so instead of the actual title, it just shows something like “New Post - [date-time]”.