django-vox 3.1.4

A notification app for Django

Django vox is a django app that allow you to create and issue different types of notifications. Notifications can have different kinds of parameters which allow for convenient editing in the admin.

Features

• Add and edit notifications from the admin

• Built-in message editor provides drop-down of available template variables and supports previewing

• Supports many backends: email (html & text), SMS (Twilio), Twitter, Slack, Postmark, XMPP, JSON webhooks, and Activity Streams

• Supports attachments

• Built in site contacts that can be used to send emails to admins, or update your organization‘s Twitter account, or send out webhooks

• Flexible API allows you to define your own user preferences about which user gets which kind of notification

• Set custom “from” addresses

• Send messages in bulk (all together) or individually customized messages

Why this exists

TLDR: Because I am lazy and I don’t want to spend my evening doing a deploy just because marketing wants to update the text in their latest spam mail.

In a few more words:

• Editing copy for notifications shouldn’t have to be done by programmers. This means:

  1. The notification templates should be editable in the admin

  2. The information necessary to correctly make a template, whether it’s a template ID or parameters) should be available in the admin page. It shouldn’t be necessary to look through source code just to make a notification work.

  3. Number 2 is actually a fairly difficult problem.

• People have different ways of interacting with computers, and one way of doing notifications (i.e. email) doesn’t always make sense.

  1. Added to that, sending a text message that’s as verbose as an HTML email is simply ridiculous. Each medium begets its own kind of content.

  2. Since, as we mentioned earlier, content should be manageable by non-programmers, the different ways of sending messages should be manageable by non-programmers.

I want it, stat!

Well, why don’t you just head over to the documentation and we’ll get you started. A word of warning, it’s not super simple to setup, but it’s worth it.