[development] RFC: Creating a Subscriptions API

[Earl Miles]

Rob Barreca wrote:
> As the new-ish maintainer for Notify module I'd definitely like to have 
> one solid subscription module (or, probably better a SubscribeAPI 
> module...calling all Eatons :-) ) to avoid all this duplication (notify, 
> subscription, subscriptions, et al).
> 
> This has been a desire of mine for a while, but lack of time has 
> hampered that. Once Drupal 5 is out, I'm going to be porting Notify and 
> will look into refactoring the code to properly implement a SubscribeAPI 
> module so other modules can subscribe to...
> 
> 1. nodes (i.e. by nid [say, for project issues], tid [forums], View [all 
> new/update nodes in a particular view], uid [all Joe's content], type, 
> etc.),
> 2. comments,
> 3. taxonomy (i.e. newly added tags),
> 4. users (i.e. new user registrations).
> 
> But I'd like (and need) some help just with the initial direction from 
> some big boys so this can get done right for D5/D6 as I'm not as great 
> of a visionary as some on this list.
> 
> Recently on the list there was talk of a relationships API and I feel 
> that SubscribeAPI could benefit from something similar so that we could 
> have one table showing relationships between a subscriber uid and 
> another node/node type/comment/vocabulary/term/view/uid/etc.

Just to throw another monkey into the works, the views scheduler module should 
be capable of notifications as well, when set up properly.