I host a lot of Drupal based websites, and one of the things I like about Drupal is that there are half a dozen ways to do just about anything you can imagine with a Drupal based website. It is also one of the things that I dislike most, trying to figure out and configure the best way to do things in Drupal. As an illustration, yesterday, I tried to find the best way to add subscriptions to a Drupal based website that I run.

Notify

The simplest module to use at add subscriptions to a website is the notify module. It doesn’t depend on any other modules. All you need to do is turn on the notify module, give the appropriate users permissions, and tell them how to use it.

When users go to their account settings, they will have a new tab that says ‘Notification Settings’. Users have the option of turning on and off notify, selecting new content or comments, and for new content, what to be sent.

The email comes as a plain text email, which isn’t always formatted all that nicely.

Subscriptions

For a little more control, there is the subscriptions framework. It has seven different modules. The core is the Subscriptions module, which is the basic framework. Other modules depend on this. To make it possible for users to subscribe to new content, you need to turn on the Subscriptions mail module, the content subscriptions module and the subscriptions UI module. There are other modules for subscribing to blog posts, to ‘taxonomy’ terms, which are generally tags or categories for posts, as well as for making CCK fields available to subscriptions.

Once the appropriate set of modules are turned, several permissions will be available allowing users to subscribe to content types, to blogs, to categories, or to comments added to specific posts.

Users are then given a tab called ‘Subscriptions’ where they can choose the material they want to subscribe to. Subscription links are also available beneath each node.

The subscriptions framework seems to produce nicer emails than the notify module. They both depend on basic Drupal email and having ‘cron’ running.

Notifications

The notifications framework is the most complicated. It depends on the token module which is also used by various other modules. It also depends on the messaging framework. The messaging framework is where you start getting some real power. In addition to being able to send plain text emails, the messaging format can send html emails, XMPP messages, SMS messages, Twitter, iPhone push notifications, and other options. Of course, several of these message format depend on other modules being loaded and the messaging framework has over half a dozen modules that you can select.

Likewise, the notifications framework has several modules to choose from. Like the Subscription framework, you will probably want to enable the basic module, the UI module, the content notifications modules probably even taxonomy notifications or even notifications views.

Once you have selected the modules you want to use, you can then need to give users the appropriate permissions. Unlike the subscriptions framework, the notification framework permissions are spread out across several different modules. When you turn on these permissions, users will see a new tab in their account settings saying ‘notifications’. Users can then add subscriptions based on author, content type, or thread.

For my uses right now, I like the subscription framework best, however, I’m looking closely at the notifications framework for future implementations.