• Description
• Installation
• Configuration
• Examples
• XML Schema
  • <releases>
  • <release>
  • <notifications>
  • <notification>
  • <title>,<description>
  • <link>
• Footnotes

Description

Magento provides a backend notification system that lacks powerful features, like auto-publish and discovery. Consequently, many extension vendors don't effectively utilize it for important announcements, like API-breaking releases, EOL notices, or deprecation of specific extension features, which can lead to transparency issues.

To address this issue, wouldn't it be nice if you could just add, say, an XML file to your module, which contains the notifications you want to publish, and the rest is handled by the notification system? It would remove the need for notification-specific models and data patches, and would not require setup upgrade to run in order for new notifications to publish.

Bottom line: It should be dead simple to use.

Installation

composer require auroraextensions/notificationservice

Configuration

Configuration is as simple as adding a notifications.xml file to the module etc directory.

Examples

Below is an example notifications.xml. For information on schema, see XML Schema.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!--
/**
 * notifications.xml
 */
-->
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:module:AuroraExtensions_NotificationService/etc/notifications.xsd">
    <releases group="notificationservice">
        <release version="1.0.0">
            <notifications>
                <notification index="0" severity="notice">
                    <title translate="true">v1.0.0 low-priority notification title</title>
                    <description translate="true">This is a low-priority notification about v1.0.0.</description>
                </notification>
                <notification index="1" severity="major">
                    <title translate="true">v1.0.0 high-priority notification title</title>
                    <description translate="true">This is a high-priority notification about v1.0.0.</description>
                    <link>https://www.example.com/</link>
                </notification>
            </notifications>
        </release>
        <release version="1.0.1">
            <notifications>
                <notification index="0" severity="minor">
                    <title translate="true">v1.0.1 medium-priority notification title</title>
                    <description translate="true">This is a medium-priority notification about v1.0.1.</description>
                </notification>
            </notifications>
        </release>
    </releases>
</config>

XML Schema

To keep it simple, the XSD provides a minimal set of element and attribute types.

As with many Magento XML configurations, <config> is the root node. All other nodes are descendants of <config>.

<releases>

The <releases> node is the outermost node and has one (1) attribute, group. The value of the group attribute should be universally unique to prevent unwanted merging. It is an array-type and should contain only <release> nodes.

Element	<releases>
Parent	<config>
XPath	/config/releases
Attributes	group: string (Required)
Required	Yes

<release>

The <release> node has one (1) attribute, version. The value of the version attribute should be the module version associated with the specific notification(s). It should contain only one (1) <notifications> node.

Element	<release>
Parent	<releases>
XPath	/config/releases/release
Attributes	version: string (Required)
Required	Yes

<notifications>

The <notifications> node is an array-type node and should only contain <notification> nodes. It has no associated attributes.

Element	<notifications>
Parent	<release>
XPath	/config/releases/release/notifications
Attributes	None
Required	Yes

<notification>

The <notification> node describes the various components of a specific notification and has two (2) attributes, index and severity. The value of the index attribute must be an int, which denotes the notification position in the resulting array of notifications. The value of the severity attribute maps to levels defined in MessageInterface [1], and must be one of the following:

• critical
• major
• minor
• notice

It should contain only one (1) node per each of the following types:

• <title>
• <description>
• <link> (Optional)

Element	<notification>
Parent	<notifications>
XPath	/config/releases/release/notifications/notification
Attributes	index: int (Required) severity: string (Required)
Required	Yes

<title>,<description>

The <title> and <description> nodes comprise the corpus of the notification. The <title> node contains the text to display on the first line of the notification, and the <description> node contains the body of the notification. Both nodes provide one (1) attribute, translate. The value of the translate attribute should always be true, otherwise simply omit the attribute to prevent translation.

Element	<title>, <description>
Parent	<notification>
XPath	/config/releases/release/notifications/notification/*[self::title or self::description]
Attributes	translate: bool (Optional)
Required	Yes

<link>

The <link> node contains a URL for the Read Details link. This node is optional and can be omitted. It has no associated attributes.

Element	<link>
Parent	<notification>
XPath	/config/releases/release/notifications/notification/link
Attributes	None
Required	No

Footnotes

[1]	Magento\Framework\Notification\MessageInterface