Notification Functionality Question
Development and Programming
I’m working on a site redesign, and one of the features I’d like to implement has me stumped about the best way to proceed. I’d like to have a top bar notification system that allows users to track certain changes…think Facebook notifications. The site is for an adoption ministry, and the largest part of the site is a photolisting of waiting children. The idea is that a visitor could select a child to “track.” Then, any time there was an update made to that child’s listing, the visitor would get a notification.
My problem is that I don’t know how best to proceed in implementing this. Does Expression Engine keep any kind of accessible log of edits that I could access? I would think the basic logic would be to keep a running total of edits for all entries…then for a given user, check to see which entries they are tracking…then use a current time variable to check how many edits have been made since the last visit…and then display the new updates.
How doable is that kind of process? What languages/built-in features would I need to research and use? Very grateful to anyone that can point me in the right direction.
The solution would depend on the approach you choose for making updates to child’s listing.
If you’re going to have and entry per child and post updates in comments, you can simply subscribe the person to comments for this entry.
Or you can let each child be a category, and assign entres to it (personally I would choose this approach). So on a category listing page, the person will see all entries related to the child. Now, for updates you can simply check whether there are new entries in selected category since person last visit.
I’m not sure if there is any ready add-on for this (check at devot-ee.com), but if not - it should be created 😊