phpBB does not provide the ability to send regular emails to users with summarized postings on a forum. Instead, phpBB expects that users will visit the phpBB forum regularly if they want to keep up with what is going on at the site or use the phpBB 3 Atom feed feature.
phpBB Digests are emails sent to users periodically with summary of postings made on a phpBB forum for discrete time periods. Digests makes some phpBB forum users’ lives easier. They don’t have to explicitly visit the site to see what conversations are going on around there. They just read their digest and if there is some topic that seems of interest, they click on the topic link in their email program and start participating! They can unsubscribe at any time. By default, weekly digests are sent on Sundays. The users determines the hour they want to receive the digest. Whatever time they choose, they will always get the latest news so they can pick a time that suits their lifestyle.
Digests can be daily, weekly or monthly. Posts older than this will not be sent in a digest. In addition, if you want you can elect not to see posts since you last logged in, if you visited recently. You can even filter out your own posts.
If a user does not want summaries of every post, they can be selective. They can pick the forum or forums that interests them. By default they will get posts for all forums that they are allowed to access.
Digests can be sent as emails containing HTML or plain text. By default the user gets the entire post as text, but they can also select to see excerpts of each post or get a list of posts with links to each post.
Please note that each digest is unique, and may have different posts in it compared to another digest going out at the same hour. It may not be an appropriate digest solution for very large boards, very busy boards or for those who want to send bulk emails of all posts for a given time period, as it is designed for flexibility, not efficiency.
Since this is a phpBB modification, it must be merged into a recent version of phpBB 3.0. You can first install AutoMOD, which makes installing this mod much easier. Note that there are steps that must be done outside of making file changes. In particular, a cron job must be set up. See the readme.html document in the archive.
Support and maintenance
I am not actively maintaining this modification and do not expect to release any new versions. Use the phpbb.com Digests for phpBB 3.0 topic which I may or may not see. Professional paid support for digests is also available. See my services page.
Screenshots
Click on the images to tour the User Control Panel and Administration Control Panel for phpBB Digests.
Click the following links to see a sample HTML digest, sample HTML classic digest and a sample text digest. What actually appears for HTML digests depends on the email program and how rigorously it adhereClick on the images to tour the User Control Panel and Administration Control Panel for phpBB Digests.s to XHTML and cascading style sheets.
User Control Panel Interface (Version 2.2.26)
Administration Control Panel Interface (Version 2.2.26)
