How to use the river massively

Hi,

We have an ELGG site in production and, more or less, once a month we update some features.

We need a way to notify all users about new features.

We've thought to use the river to include this notifications. Therefore, if for instance we include a new notification method a message appears in the river of all the users explaining it.

We've looked for a plugin that does something similar but the most similar plugin we found is the massnotifier which sends massively emails to all the users of the system.

However, we'd like to include these notifications in the river also (as the advertisements in Facebook).

We noticed that the method to add events to the river,

add_to_river(
		$viewname,
		$action,
		$user_performing_action_guid,
		$entity_being_acted_on_guid
	);

associates the river item to a user so just the friends of it will get the notification.


What is the best way to do this? Is there any method which adds items to the rivers of all the users? Or, on the other hand, we have to create a Notifier user which is friend by default of all the system users and use its wire to create the notifications?

  • Of course, we have a private river just with friends and mine tabs.

  • Actually, there is only "one" river. It's only a matter of access level of river items and filtering (tab) that results in not every river item being visible to every user. The fact that you disabled the All tab is of course the reason why it's now difficult to implement the notification of news via a river item. Creating a "notification" account that's friend to all users would help you to get the notification to appear on every "friend" tab. But the members would be able to unfriend this notification account and then would not see these river items anymore. So, there's no 100% security to reach every user for sure.

    Maybe another way to achieve your goal would be to add river items based on their subtype (e.g. "notification") also to the "Friends" and "Mine" tab.

  • For the notification user system try : http://community.elgg.org/plugins/734185/1.4.2/multiple-be-tom-friends

    Also you can create a site message system, which will show the latest site news in the user dashboard.

  • I use a "sticky" notice on top of the river to display info about important changes etc. The feature exist in the 3c river plugin.

  • Thanks colleagues! Finally, I opted for the be tom plugin because it avoids to unfriend the Notifications User. Thanks again for yout help.