DOCman Secrets: Email notifications

Whether you are running an intranet or a public website, as an administrator, you often need to keep a close eye on what your users are doing. Especially when they are allowed to edit documents or upload new files. With DOCman Notify, it’s easy to set up email notifications. Notify is part of the DOCman Productivity Pack. Tom made another great video tutorial, showing how it’s done.

Watch the DOCman Notify 1.5 Video.

1. Install the plugin iusing Joomla’s extension installer
2. Go to the Plugin Manager and edit the plugin’s settings
3. Don’t forget to enable the plugin. If you want turn of notifications later, just disable it again
4. In the “Send to” field, enter your email address
5. If you want to send to multiple recipients, separate the email addresses with the pipe symbol “|”
6. Turn on the notifications you wish to receive. The first three options will send an email whenever a user uploads, edits or downloads a document in the front-end of your site. The last option notifies you when a manager or (super) administrator edits a document through the backend interface.
7. Save the plugin settings
8. Try one of the upload, edit or download actions that you enabled
9. Check your inbox. The email contains all kinds of useful info about the user, the document and the file.

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Advanced customization

If you don’t like the look of the email, or you want it to have a different set of information, you can easily do so by modifying the email template. The /plugins/docman/notify/templates folder contains two php files, one for the email body and one for the footer. They contain standard html and css, plus a couple of php variables. If you have some html experience, you should have no problem editing these to your liking.

It’s your workflow

Every organization has their own workflow needs. DOCman’s flexible plugin system allows developers to add workflow rules and behavior to DOCman, and in fact, DOCman Notify is great example to start from. We’d love to hear how you use DOCman, and how you would like to see it improved. So make sure to vote for feature suggestions (or submit your own) in our ideas tracker.