Joomla Tutorials and Blog Posts

In the Components menu, you can find the Messaging extension. Click that link.

You'll now be able to send privates messages to other users, so long as they are in the Super Users or Administrator groups.

Although this private messaging feature exists, I've never seen or heard of anyone using it.

Why would the use it when there are so many alternatives such as Skype, email, phone calls and project managements systems. Still, this private messaging is actually the only feature of Messaging that is mentioned in the Joomla documentation.

However, Messaging does have a second, potentially far more useful feature: notifications.

Let's see an example of how notifications work:

• Go to Menus > Main Menu and make a new menu link.
• Choose the Create Article menu item type.

Now when people at the Author level and above visit the site, they can submit content from the front-end.

Once they submit an article, they'll get this message:

In the backend of the site, administrators will also get a message. It will show in the top-right corner as shown below:

Click the link, and you get taken to the Messaging component. In here you can see a message that a new article was submitted:

Here's what the message will look like:

You'll also receive an email. This email feature can be turned off if you get too many of these messages.

• Reverse the tabs inside the Messaging component itself, so that the Messages tab is more prominent.
• Remove the Messaging link from the main Components dropdown.

Why do this? Simply because the Messaging extension has no use as a private message extension.

However, it does work well as a notification system, which brings me to suggestion #2:

We should encourage developers to use this as a universal notifications system for Joomla:

• E-commerce extensions could notify admins about new orders.
• Calendar extensions could notify admins when new events are submitted.
• Comments extensions could notify admins when new comments are made or existing ones are marked as spam.

It could be wonderful to have one single place to find all of the important updates for your site. Notifications is a feature that people would actually use.