Messenger — multi-channel notifications

The Messenger module is Open Intranet’s company-wide notification system. It lets administrators broadcast a message to anyone the organisation needs to reach — Drupal users, external contacts that have no Drupal account (“deskless workers” — frontline staff, contractors, customers, partners) — across one or more delivery channels (email by default, SMS via SMSAPI, custom plugins for any other transport).

Every send goes through a single recipient picker (all contacts, by department, by role, individual selection), a channel selector and a message editor. Every send is logged so admins can audit who got what, when, on which channel, and whether it succeeded.

What it is

Messenger is a custom Open Intranet module (openintranet_messenger) that ships with the core recipe. It adds a custom Messenger Contact entity for non-Drupal recipients, a channel plugin system (#[NotificationChannel] attribute), a recipient resolver service, a notification log entity and a small admin UI under Configuration → Messenger (/admin/openintranet/messenger).

Messenger is the underlying broadcast mechanism behind the platform’s Send a reminder email action on Must Read reports, the notify all users about new checkbox on News articles, and any custom workflow that needs to fan out a message to a defined audience.

Components

The dashboard

/admin/openintranet/messenger is the entry point. It shows three KPIs at the top — Contacts (active vs. total), Notifications (last 24h), Available Channels — and four primary actions:

• Send Notification — open the broadcast form
• Manage Contacts — list, create, edit, delete external contacts
• View Log — full history of sends
• Settings — channel configuration, defaults

A sticky Send notification button is also pinned to the top-right of the page for one-click access.

External contacts

The messenger_contact entity captures recipients who are not Drupal users:

Field	Purpose
Name	Full name.
Email	Email address (used by the Email channel).
Phone	Phone number (used by the SMS channel).
Department	Taxonomy reference for grouping.
Preferred channel	The default channel for this contact (Email, SMS, etc.).
Status	Active / inactive.

Contacts can be added one by one through the UI, imported in bulk from a CSV (/admin/openintranet/messenger/contacts/import), or created through the API. The contact list also supports per-field configuration through Field UI (/admin/openintranet/messenger/contacts/settings), so site builders can extend the schema (e.g. add a language field for localised messages).

The Send Notification form

/admin/openintranet/messenger/send is a single page with three sections:

1. Recipients — split into External Contacts and Drupal Users. For each you choose None / All active / Selected and (when Selected) pick by department, role, or individual.
2. Channel — pick the delivery channel. Defaults to Recipient’s preference (which honours each contact’s preferred_channel); also exposes each enabled channel directly (Email, SMS, etc.).
3. Message — Subject + body. Drupal tokens are supported in both fields, so a single message can include [user:display-name], the site name, the current date, etc., and be personalised per recipient.

Submitting the form runs the broadcast through Drupal’s batch API (in chunks, recommended for large recipient lists) and returns a success summary plus a link to the relevant entry in the log.

Channels

Channels are pluggable. The base Messenger module ships:

• Email — always available, uses Drupal’s mail system.

The optional SMSAPI↗ module adds:

• SMS — sends through your configured SMSAPI account.

A site can add any number of additional channels by writing a plugin class with the #[NotificationChannel] attribute (Slack, Teams, push notification, internal HTTP webhook, …). The plugin only needs to implement isAvailable() and send($recipient, $subject, $message).

#[NotificationChannel(
  id: 'my_channel',
  label: new TranslatableMarkup('My Channel'),
)]
class MyChannel extends ChannelPluginBase {
  public function isAvailable(): bool { return TRUE; }
  public function send(RecipientInterface $r, string $s, string $m): bool { /* ... */ }
}

Channels enabled in Settings appear automatically in the dashboard’s Available Channels list and in the Channel dropdown of the Send form.

Settings

/admin/openintranet/messenger/settings lets the admin:

• Enable / disable each available channel.
• Set the default channel.
• Configure per-channel options (sender name, sender email, SMS sender ID, etc.).
• Configure SMSAPI integration (via the SMSAPI module’s own config at /admin/smsapi/configuration).

Notification log

/admin/openintranet/messenger/log is the audit trail. Every send writes a row with:

• Timestamp
• Recipient (name, channel address)
• Channel used
• Subject + message excerpt
• Status (sent / failed / skipped) + reason
• Triggering user

The log is searchable and filterable per channel, status and date range. It is the source of truth for “did the user actually receive the email?” troubleshooting.

Recipient resolver service

For programmatic use (custom modules, ECA actions, drush scripts), Messenger exposes two services:

$resolver = \Drupal::service('openintranet_messenger.recipient_resolver');
$service  = \Drupal::service('openintranet_messenger.notification_service');

$recipients = $resolver->resolveAllActiveContacts();
// Or: $resolver->resolveByDepartment('marketing');
// Or: $resolver->resolveByUserRole('content_editor');

$result = $service->sendBulk($recipients, 'Subject', 'Message body');
echo "Sent: " . $result->getSentCount();

This is how internal features like notify all users about new on News articles fire their broadcasts — through the same plumbing the admin form uses.

Integration with other features

• News articles — The field_notify_all_users_about_new toggle on a News article triggers a Messenger broadcast at publish time (audience: all active users).
• Must Read tracking — The Send a reminder email action on a Must Read report posts to the Views Send↗ form, which uses the same email infrastructure.
• Employee Directory — Recipient selection by department / office uses the same taxonomies as the Employee Directory.
• Access Control & Groups — A future channel plugin can resolve recipients via OI Group membership (e.g. “all active users in Berlin Office and its descendants”); the resolver service is plugin-aware.
• ECA — no-code workflows — A custom ECA action can fire a notification on any modelled event (entity insert / update / delete, cron, user login).

Permissions

Permission	Default role(s)
Administer Messenger (channels, defaults, contact schema)	Administrator
Manage Messenger contacts (create / edit / delete contacts, CSV import)	Administrator
View Messenger contacts	Administrator
Send notifications	Administrator
View notification log	Administrator

Permissions are intentionally restrictive — broadcasting to the entire company is a high-impact action.

Modules behind it

• openintranet_messenger — entities, services, channels, admin UI
• Drupal core: taxonomy, field, entity, user, views
• SMSAPI↗ — optional, for the SMS channel
• Symfony Mailer↗ — optional, for advanced HTML email and per-tenant SMTP

Learn more

• How to administer it — admin tasks for users (Messenger administration sits in the same area)
• Must Read tracking — the read-tracking feature whose reminder emails go through Messenger plumbing
• News and Articles — the article-publish broadcast that uses Messenger
• SMSAPI module on drupal.org↗