I have not created a new feature update for a while. And the reason was not that I was not working on new stuff. In contrary I am very busy with a new notification system for Squidex.
A new feature for Squidex
A while ago I started to worked on a new notification system, because I have realized that it is an very important feature for our Enterprise customers. When dozens or even hundreds of users work together to create content items, it is important to get notifications when your content item is rejected or approved by a reviewer or when another administrator adds a contributor to your app or when a schema has changed. Therefore i wanted to introduce a new system where the user itself can decide which updates he or she wants to receive and which channel should be used for that. For example email or in-app notifications or web push.
The challenges
I started working on it and realized that it is not a simple feature, because you have to care about stuff like:
- Which notifications have been seen.
- Queues to decouple the creating of notifications from the distribution. Even multiple queues for different channels are needed.
- Aggregations to send out multiple notifications in on email to reduce the noise.
- Scheduling, when a user wants to receive only one update per day.
- The integration of multiple channels.
- Management of topics and subscriptions, so that an end user can make individual decisions how to receive notifications.
- Email templates to brand the emails with custom logo and legal information.
- Tracking and logging to get information about which notifications have been sent out and which have failed.
- Access to cheap email servers when ten-thousands emails per month or day will be sent.
Therefore I was looking for an existing solution to leverage but I was not lucky. So I decided to create my own system as a standalone system and as an extension to Squidex.
This new notification system is called
Notifo
Notifo LogoYou can have a first impression on the landing page: https://notifo.io
Backend Start Screen
Overview about all Events
Notification templates
Email Designer using MJMLnotifo will replace and extend the current notification system during the next months.
But now comes the very controversial part: notifo is Not Free.
There are a few reasons for that. First of all, it takes a lot of time to build a system in a generic way, so that it can be hosted in different environments. You have to support multiple integrations, for example for storage, operation systems and cloud providers. And you also have to give support for that. This does not pay of so far and takes too much time. Furthermore the business model with Open Source is challenging, because most users just use the free version.
If you want to use notifo for your own Squidex installation you will have to configure Squidex with API keys and buy a subscription for notifo. The pricing will be low and based on the number of sent notifications, emails and so on. Pricing will be very similar to many indirect contributors for example Mailjet.
Your feedback is very welcome and I will update you when notifo is ready to use and integrated in Squidex.