Email Event Reminders

I have read several threads here about sending reminders for upcoming events. They were kinda old threads so decided to start a new one. I will outline some features that I would like to see..

Have an option to send reminders or not that the event creator can decide (frontend)
Have an option to enter the amount of time before the event to send out reminders (week before or a day)
Only email one group or only a few groups.
Admin able to send out event reminders manually.

I manage a Jeep club website and EL has been the best extension for us. If we had this feature, it would be complete.

I am willing to donate to someone for helping me construction such an addon. If someone can get a foundation started, I could implement the details.

Thanks for reading!

hi Codlink,

The idea you're mentioning has indeed been mentioned before and it would be nice to have such option.
Let's hope someone picks this one up, but if it's not within 2 weeks then [strike]maybe[/strike] I'll try to create something.
--> in my case i don't want to have a donation

Greetings,
Blue

Thanks for the reply!

codlink wrote: Thanks for the reply!

no problem..

The thing is that i do like to have such option for personal website and as the option mentioned is currently not possible with JEM it needs to be created so will take a look at it anyway.

Thanks Bluefox. Any help will be highly appreciated! I am sure that others will benefit from this addon as well.

Another slightly different idea could be to let attendee specify the reminder themself. The registration form could be enhanced by something like "[ ] Send me a reminder email [X] hours before event starts" which could be stored in a new field in attendee db table.
To be more complete it should be possible for an attendee to edit this setting later - maybe by adapting the "unregister" form which could allow to unregister or keep registered but change reminder setting. Or maybe a fast access via My Attendances view not requiring to enter event details view.

My idea more detailed:

• user registers with reminder or edit reminder time
  • value will be stored (as negative offset to event start date/time) in attendee record
  • absolute date/time will be calculated and "next run reminder" date/time updated if required
    ("next run reminder" is a global value like the "last run" value used for archive/recurrence task)
• event's start date/time changes
  • all related attendee records will be checked and "next run reminder" recalculated / updated as required
  • attendees should always get an email triggered by event changes, so it's no problem if they already got a reminder email. But because the offset is then cleared they will not get a new reminder - maybe a problem?
• "next run reminder" time reached / over
  • all attendee records will be checked by calculating absolute date/time
  • relevant reminder emails will be sent and on success corresponding reminder offset cleared in record (on failure a retry counter should be used to limit tries - a second new field on attendee db table)
  • "next run reminder" will be updated (simply using absolute date/time from next unfinished record)

Generally there are some issues we should keep in mind:

• Because there is no cron job running on the server a user must enter a JEM page (or any page of the site when using a system plugin) to trigger the reminder task. So there is no guarantee to get the email in time.
• The mailer plugin is "unsafe". Meaning there is no knowledge if emails are sent successfully. Users expect to get exact one email but mailer can't guarantee that. This makes it difficult to decide when the reminder can be marked as sent (also after adding some error checks).
• The task should be as fast as possible to prevent script execution timeouts. (that's a general issue, more important on the other emails with more recipients)