[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Display user messages in the notifications.

Notifications application is almost ready to replace the Activity Stream's UI. The only remaining thing is the display of the messages from the Message Stream in the Notifications. We have made a quick brainstorming with Caty and Vincent, and here is our conclusions. 1/ We think it make sense to display user messages in the notifications because it is typically what notifications are made for: pop-up important information concerning what the user cares. In the past, we decided to disable the Message Stream by default because messages were lost in the Activity Stream. But in the case of the notifications, users can chose what they want to receive so there is less chance to miss messages in the middle of thousand of events. 2/ Like all other types of notification, there should be a button in the notification settings of each user to decide to enable or disable these messages in the notifications. It should be enabled by default. 3/ We should add the "send message" gadget in the "alert" menu (via an UIX) so it's easy to find and to send messages. 4/ Provide a form to be able to reply to a personal message. 5/ Let the message stream disabled by default. Users who are used to it will not lose the feature but we don't make it visible for now until we make some other improvements. This is what I am starting to implement right now with the hope it's done for XWiki 10.5. In the future, we should add the following features: a/ Having a real "inbox" application (a "Message Center") to handle all messages. b/ Be notified when someone mention you in a content or in a comment (example: "@vmassol: You may want to read this page" will trigger a notification to Vincent Massol). c/ Handling correcty messages sent to a group if the first implementation do not handle it (group filtering could be a problem with SQL). Caty, Vincent, please reply if I've forget something. All others: if you have any recommendation or counter argument, please post it quickly :) Thanks for you time and have a great day, Guillaume -- Guillaume Delhumeau (guillaume.delhumeau(a)xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project