Notification Center 2.0 has been released! 🥳

[Toflar]

Fellow Contao users, we finally did it, we have just released Notification Center 2.0 which is fully compatible with both, Contao 4.13 LTS and Contao 5.3 LTS! 🥳

We are very excited about this release because it's been in the works for 1.5 years! I started working on version 2 on September 14, 2022 and I've personally invested way over 200 hours of work. It's a huge release, both for us as well as for the Contao community.

The Notification Center has been around for more than 11 years now. I started the project in 2013 as part of working on Isotope eCommerce 2.0.

Ever since then, the code base of the Notification Center has not changed considerably. The PHP world, however, has and so did the popularity of the Notification Center. Today, it's one of the most widely used Contao extensions.
With the release of Contao 5.0 it has become evident that we needed to rework the software architecture of the Notification Center completely. There was no point in making it "just compatible". We needed to bring it to the next level if we want to make it sustainable for another 10 years.

Now, the day has finally arrived! The most important design decision was to make the Notification Center the best foundation for sending notifications in Contao ever. We focussed on the hard problems and tried to solve them for developers. On the other hand, we've dropped quite some user features. Features we have never used ourselves, which made maintenance hard and unreliable. Instead of building the features ourselves, we wanted to make sure the community could build them. Hence, we've dropped for example

• The built-in Postmark gateway
• The built-in queue gateway
• The built-in file gateway
• and more, checkout the UPGRADE.md for details.

Instead, the Notification Center 2.0 is rather lean. Well, it still consists of 5.5k lines of code, so it's still huge but let's say it is a tiny bit leaner than its predecessor in user features but massive for developers 😊 That doesn't mean we have no nice new user features, though! What about:

• Notification Center 2.0 can now automatically generate the text variant based on HTML for e-mails. It
  does try to be smart about converting links, lists etc. so it's not just text, it actually converts HTML to nice lists and more!
• The corresponding language does not need an exact match of the root page language settings
  anymore. It will try to fall back to the general locale first, before taking the one that is
  configured to be fallback. E.g. (de_CH first, then de and only then the fallback).
• You can now configure start and stop publish times for messages.
• New tokens and much more, checkout the CHANGELOG.md for details or just give it a try!

For developers, however, version 2.0 cannot even be compared to v1. The entire code base has been rewritten from scratch and there are all sorts of nice conceptual changes such as

• A concept that evolves around sending parcels and eceiving a receipt when sending them.
• Stamps for arbitrary meta data.
• A bulky items storage. It solves the problem of storing notification attachments. Where to store them, how long to store them and more.
• Events, lots of events to customize everything you need.
• A nice concept to inform the Notification Center about which tokens are available for what notification type in which fields, no more huge config.php arrays.
• and much, much more

Docs

Yes, we wrote docs, here you go: https://extensions.terminal42.ch/docs/notification-center/

Notification Center Pro 🔔❤️

The Notification Center itself is - and will remain forever - provided for free. We believe it makes it significantly easier for
extension developers to make notifications of their extensions configurable by their users. Hence, we want to make it
easy for you to require the Notification Center as a dependency.

More than 200 hours of development and we know we will have to keep maintaining it for years to come. Hence, we decided to provide additional functionality with a separate, commercial extension: Notification Center Pro!

With Notification Center Pro you can level up your Notification Center game and benefit from a lot of additional features
while also supporting the further development and maintenance of the Notification Center itself. Win-win!

Here is a short list of features you can expect from Notification Center Pro:

• Send messages only on configurable conditions
• Super useful additional tokens such as the formoptions_* simple token
• Log all the notifications sent via Notification Center!
  • Logs are kept for a configurable amount of days (7 by default)
  • Allows to re-send notifications right from the logs and even allows to adjust certain information e.g.
  • Simple Tokens, so you can test things easily
  • Provides a diff viewer to see differences between log entries being sent based on another one
• Provides custom simple tokens! You can conveniently create your own, custom Simple Tokens based on other tokens. This will allow you to be a lot more flexible by extracting partial information from other tokens, combining them or virtually doing whatever you can do with Twig with them.
• Provides a "void" gateway: This gateway does not send any message at all. Instead, it just fakes delivery allowing for easier testing.

💰 Go get Notification Center Pro today!

Final words

We hope you like the new version as much as we do. We gave it our all, so join us in welcoming NC 2.0 to the Contao Community and spread the word! Happy Birthday to you, shiny new kid on the block! 🥳 🎉 🔔 ❤️