In the world of Q2A, I wear three different hats, each with its own set of needs:
- As a plugin developer, I need a simple and extensible way to show custom notifications to users
- As a theme developer, I need to easily integrate notifications plugins to my themes
- As a user, I need to see my notifications in a simple and fast way (including RTL and mobile)
So I decided to develop a plugin that would tackle these 3 issues.
The main plugin features are:
- Generates notifications for users based on Q2A's events (e.g. an answer is added to a user's question)
- Efficient database access
- Avoids many database accesses by utilizing the core's built-in caching mechanisms (memcached is, by far, the fastest)
- Allows plugins to extend the notifications from the core easily
- Allows themes to replace the look and feel of the plugin
- Tracks read/unread notifications
- The built-in UI and the internal notification tracking logic are decoupled
Even though the features might sound a bit "technical" take into account 2 out of the main needs I mentioned above are mainly intended for developers. This will allow other developers to extend and integrate with this plugin easily.
By the way, this is what the built-in UI looks like:
You can give it a try downloading it from the GitHub project page.
