It’s been some time since we released the Messaging and Notifications, and the modules are quite healthy. Besides us using them in our site builds and intranet, they’re already running in more than 3,000 other sites, according to the Drupal.org usage statistics report. If we needed more encouragement to keep working on them, there it is :-)

We’re planning a big release for both frameworks that will include new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve just tagged them both as 6.x-1.2-beta1 and hope that some people will help us with testing and the final polishing. There really are many improvements and new features, so I’ll just include notes and screenshots on some of them here. If you’d like to know about them all and have some more time, you can read the full change logs.

For the Messaging framework, perhaps the most interesting new feature is support for David’s Token Logic module (yeah, conditional tokens for templates!). The other changes – besides smoother integration with all available sending methods (SMS, XMPP, Twitter, Privatemsg, several mail engines…) – are focused on the administration UI. I hope it will now be much easier to set up.

Here are screenshots of the Messaging settings and the Messaging templates pages:

For Notifications, there’s now a new overview page and subscriptions management page on the user account tabs that now can be fully disabled.

Here are screenshots of these pages:

I hope you noticed the new simple subscription check boxes with names like “Subscribe to interesting posts by Jose.” This is part of the new custom subscriptions that can be created by site administrators and made available (or not) on the user registration page .

There are now nice autocomplete fields available for a number of different pages, like adding a subscription to some content type posted by a selected user.

Along with these changes there are many others that you cannot really see but may pick up on. One is a new query builder that uses schema and fields information and will speed up all database queries. There’s also Views support, which will make some notifications and messaging fields available for views, done by Young Hahn and David Goode.

The UI module, which was maybe the weakest part of the toolset, has gotten a serious face lift. It’s really difficult to combine more and more powerful options with a more usable settings page. so I’ve been trying hard on this one… Well, you tell me.

Still, it is possible to enable different options per content type because there’s a ‘Set up for each content type’ radio button. (What about having thread subscription links for story nodes but having a subform for subscribing to authors on blogs?)

As usual, you can get notifications by SMS or XMPP and now you can additionally receive a weekly digest by email of all these other messages/notifications).

So please, give it a try, post your feedback and comments here, and please put any issues on the issue tracker – we’ll be happy to follow up there.

Stay tuned for some more cool modules soon.