You will need to set the following variables in the typo3conf/ext/kc_emailnotification/cli/cronconf.php file:
$CRONCONF["cronemail"] = "info@web.com”; (the email address you want to sent the notifications from.
$CRONCONF["cronname"] = "Email Name"; (the name you want shown as sender)
$CRONCONF["cronfrequency"] = "60"; (the time in minutes for the cronjob, this MUST be the same as the actual cron configuration (see Set-up Cronjob section below) to make sure that users do not get notifiied double or not at all.
$CRONCONF["cronbaseurl"] = “www.website.com"; (the url of your website, needed for the links in the emails)
You will also need to modify the bold part in this line in the typo3conf/ext/kc_emailnotification/cli/kc_emailnotification.php file.
define('PATH_thisScript','/path/to/typo3/typo3conf/ext/kc_emailnotification/cli/test/');
Finally, you will need to add a new Back-end user to your typo3 installation, this name:
_cli_kc_emailnotification
This user is not allowed to be an Admin user.
Finally, you will need to setup the cronjobs.
Cron jobs can only be setup in Unix environments. If you are hosting on Windows, this extension will not work.
Unix
A great tutorial for how to setup cron jobs in unix directly is given here:
http://www.htmlcenter.com/tutorials/tutorials.cfm/155/PHP/
Use this command (enter your own path at the location with bold letters):
php /path_to_typo3/typo3conf/ext/kc_emailnotification/cli/kc_emailnotification.php
cPanel
Siteground.com gives a small tutorial for how to set up cronjobs in cPanel: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cpanel/cron_jobs.htm
Make sure to enter the command as given above.
Plesk
http://www.swsoft.com/doc/tutorials/Plesk/Plesk7/plesk_plesk7_eu/plesk7_eu_crontab.htm
Again, use the same command as above.
If you forget any of these steps, the emails will not be sent!
The file 'predefined.sql' in the 'doc' folder contains the SQL commands to upload the first 3 predefined notification event types. These are:
Content Change: When someone changed content on one of your pages.
New BE User: When a new BE user is added.
New Page: When a new page is added.
Please let me know if you see the need for additional predefined notifications. I will be happy to add them.
The most useful feature of this extension is that you can create your own custom notifications. Below follows a little example of such a custom notification. Suppose we installed the kc_sermonmgr plugin to manage all the sermons and other content of our own church. It would be great if our Front-End users could decide to be notified each time a new sermon was added to the website. In order to achieve this, we need to follow these steps:
Create new custom notification. Go to the Back-End and click on Tools > Notifications > Manage Custom Notifications
Click on 'Create New Notification'.
Create an Event LL Label (LL stands for Local Language, you can use the multilanguage capabilities of Typo3 with this extension). Press save.
Now you will need to modify the locallang.xml file that you can find in typo3conf/ext/kc_emailnotification/pi1/ folder. Add these two lines:
<label index="newsermon_label">New Sermon</label>
<label index="newsermon_description">When a new sermon is added.</label>
Go back to Tools>Notifications>Manage Custom Notifications. You should now see the label and description appear that you just entered in the locallang.xml file.
Keep the status of Off for the time being. Keep the FE/BE selector on FE (since we want to make this a FE users notification).
Enter the page ID of the page that contains the kc_sermonmgr plugin in the link PID field. This will be used in the URLs that will be embedded in the notification email to bring the users straight to the right section where the changes have been made. This works fine also with realURL. This page ID can also be dynamic. If you enter ###pid### instead of a page number, the extension will search for the 'pid' that is defined in the event query (see point 9 below). Also, if you want to link to a section in the Back-End, then enter '0' for the page ID.
Enter the page ID of the sys-folder where you want this event type to be stored in the Page PID field.
Create the query for this event. This is probably the most complicated thing of creating custom notifications. The extension uses plain SQL to find those events in the Database that should trigger the notifications. All fields that you want to use need to be selected. In our example, the query is quite straightforward:
SELECT uid, title, crdate
FROM tx_kcsermonmgr_sermons
Note, if you do not know SQL, you can:
Use the phpMyAdmin extension, under the Query tab you can create your query from the tables present in the database.
Use the Tools > DB Check > Search Whole Database > Advanced Query > Make Query to make your own SQL query
Learn basic SQL (http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp)
Enter the database field that determines the timing (whether the event should be selected or not) in the Time field box. In our case, we want only new sermons. That means that we will use the tx_kcsermonmgr_sermons.crdate field here. Only sermons that have a crdate (a unix date/time field, based on seconds) that is smaller then the start-time of our time-interval will be selected.
You can now do a first little test to see if what you entered so far works. The time interval for testing can be adjusted by entering for example 100 in the “For testing only! Select the number of days ago from which events should be shown. “ field. So this would be the setup screen for our first test:
and this would be the test result:
You can see that we added 13 sermons in the last 100 days. (some of them are really good! ;-))
There is however no text yet for the links that are going to be created, and there are no users yet who have signed on for this notification (not possible since it is still switched off).
So the next step is
Add the text for the links. You can use the results of the event query by using their fieldnames with ### markers. So, we would like to show the sermon name and the create date for example. Thus we would enter the following in the Link Text field (crdate and tstamp fields will automatically be transformed into a readable format).
###title### - ###crdate###
Now, the links can also be provided with a set of parameters at the end. In our case, we have to give the ID of the sermon. We can use also the ### markers here. Thus is our case, these would be the:
tx_kcsermonmgr_pi1[showUid]=###uid###
If you want to link to a section in the Back-End, you can use the following as parameter. This will point to the page with ID=0 (the root of the site).
/typo3/db_list.php?id=0
If the plugin is not a USER_INT, you will probably want to use the chash parameter as well. Make sure you set the “use chash” to yes. (note, this is not implemented yet!!)
We have to make sure we get the id's of those users who need to be modified. In our case, this is very straightforward, since this is an extra field (the “User Condition” field), we can use it to create even more advanced notifications. The field with the userid needs to be names “notifyuser”, using an alias AS. Thus, in our case we use:
SELECT uid AS notifyuser
FROM fe_users
WHERE deleted=0 AND disable=0
ORDER BY notifyuser
The notifyuser needs some more explanation. The “AS notifyuser” can be used both in the “User Condition” field (as in the example above) or in the “Event Query” field.
Suppose we would have a system in which there is a discussion forum. We could then offer the option that you get notified if somebody else makes a reply to one of your postings. This means, the 'notifyuser' would actually be part of the event query, since you only want those users to be notified who have received a reply to their posting. Such an SQL query could then look like the following:
SELECT tx_discussion_1.feuser AS notifyuser, tx_discussion_thread.name, tx_discussion.thread, tx_discussion_thread.category, tx_idea.uid, tx_idea.name AS ideaname
FROM tx_discussion, tx_discussion AS tx_discussion_1, tx_discussion_thread, tx_idea
WHERE tx_discussion_1.thread = tx_discussion_thread.uid AND tx_discussion.parent = tx_discussion_1.uid AND tx_idea.uid = tx_discussion.idea
Notice that we now used the “AS notifyuser” in the event query. (In this example, we needed to add a second copy of the discussion table because of the chilc-parent relation that determines if one of the postings was a reply to another posting or not).
The last step is to switch the notification on, and make sure at least one user has selected it. We can now test all the elements of our custom notification. In our case, the we have the following screen:
Which would result in the following if press the “Test this notification” button:
It works. You can even click on the created links to see if they take you to the right page.
