Tech Support Case Studies

If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that website users like to get timely notifications via email if there is something new to be seen on the site. Acquia Drupal includes the comment notify module that can help achieve this goal for your site. It sends email messages to content authors and commentators whenever new comments are added to content. There are ample subscription options to suit everyone, and an unsubscribe mechanism so that nobody has to endure unwanted items in their inbox.

The first thing you'll want to do is set the permissions for the module correctly. Here's a screenshot of the pertinent permissions. The biggest decision is how you want anonymous users to be treated.

If anonymous users can post comments, and if they are to get notified, they need to be able to leave their email address. This is configured on the content type edit form, and must be configured per content type.

The comment notify module lets content authors specify whether they want to get notified of comments on their posts. This is done via their user profile page (q=user/x/edit). Note that this is a total on/off switch, there's no per-post or per-content type setting for this.

This is what your site visitors are presented with when writing new comments.

The default texts in the emails sent by comment notify are somewhat verbose. I succeeded in making the texts more compact. The templates can be changed at q=admin/settings/comment_notify

Here's the template I used for Default mail text for sending out notifications to commenters:

And here's the template I used for Default mail text for sending out the notifications to node authors.

Note the difference between the two templates is only the Unsubscribe: !link1

Have fun with the comment notify module. Sometimes simple modules like this make a big difference in bringing visitors back to your site.