Some time ago we released the Notifications and Messaging packages as two handy and flexible frameworks to handle user subscriptions, notifications, and multiple messaging methods.

The good welcome to these tools by other developers has pushed us to keep working hard on them and that means a lot of improvements have gotten into both frameworks since the initial release. Thanks to everyone who's been sending feedback and/or patches for them. We've also been using the frameworks for our Intranet for some time now (yes, they work!) so a lot of ideas and improvements have come from our day to day user experience.

Here are a few of the big improvements:

• Two new messaging plug-ins
• SMS developed by Tim Cullen
• PHPMailer contributed by Ted Serbinski
• Better message formatting, improved filtering, and nice HTML to text conversion
• Support for bulk messaging - not just for sending messages to single users anymore
• Many usability improvements and bug fixes

There are now lots of different plug-ins for different subscription types and more coming. You'll be able to manage them all from your user account. 

Here's a look at the main messaging settings page. See the new SMS and HTML mail (Phpmailer) plug-ins enabled and available:

As a simple proof of how easy is to develop a new messaging method plug-in, both of the new ones are around 100 lines of code and that's counting comments and white lines :-). Also we're learning as we go and based on this experience,  plug-in support is now much improved so it
will be even easier to create new ones.

We'll be presenting this work at the Boston DrupalCon so if you are interested in better notifications for your website users, you shouldn't miss the Mail, Notifications, and Messaging Framework session next week.

Coming soon: Upgrading to Drupal 6