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dpcalendar ssoft solutions plugin

We all know about the great flexibility DPCalendar offers but some use cases from our users are quite special. As it was for Sven Scheidler from Ssoft-Solutions. For one of their clients they needed an enhanced notification system when guest visitors are creating events on the front end of the Joomla site. This guest blog post will describe their way with an upgrade proof solution.

DPCalendar integrates Joomla functionality as much as possible, so it makes extensively use of the Joomla event system. It is possible to hook itself into the workflow of DPCalendar with a self written Joomla plugin. The approach from Ssoft-Solutions was, to develop such a plugin and send out notifications based on various criteria.

Requirements

It is possible to allow none registered users to create events on the front end of DPCalendar. Through permission settings it can be defined that these events should not be published automatically, because an admin needs to approve them first. So an admin needs to get a notification when a new event is created.

DPCalendar has already a notification system, which allows to send out notifications to user groups when events are manipulated. This is enough for most of our user base, but not for Ssoft Solutions. They need to get notifications sent to specific E-Mail addresses and not to whole user groups. Additionally, the notifications should only get out for front end events.

Solution

First thing is to disable the notification system of DPCalendar completely, no user groups should be selected in the DPCalendar options. As a second step a new Joomla content plugin was developed which contains the notification logic. This plugin hooks into the process when an event is created or edited and sends out the notifications based on the plugin settings. The plugin contains the following configuration options:

  • An E-Mail address where all notifications should be sent to.
  • Send notifications on front end only or front end and back end actions like creating or updating an event.
  • Send notifications for new events or updated events or both.
  • Body text for the message, if none is defined a default text will be taken. Additionally the title, ID and calendar name will be sent out with the notification mail.

The plugin can be downloaded free of charge from here. Ssoft-Solutions will be happy to get feedback through the contact form on their site.

We would like to say tank you to Digital Peak for their great software DPCalendar!

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