Umbraco Notifications - Save and Send For Approval Process

In Umbraco you can give different permissions to the different Umbraco users and some of these users might have rights to only create or update content nodes but not to publish them. In this case; you might need your Umbraco system to send notification e-mails to the Umbraco users who can then publish the content nodes.

To do this; you can write your own custom code by creating some event handlers or you can use built-in Umbraco notification functionality.

For the second built-in option first login to Umbraco as admin and go to User's section and update the permissions as shown below;

Once you are done with the user permissions, subscribe your Umbraco users to the content nodes, simply login to Umbraco with those users and find the content node, right click on it and select the following option;

After this you need to make changes in the web.config file of your Umbraco project. For my case I am using my test gmail account for sending e-mails. In order to use your gmail account as your SMTP server, first login to gmail and then go to Google's less secure app access page and allow less secure apps. You might need to enable account access as well by following this google link: https://accounts.google.com/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

After doing these changes on the Google's access page, now change your web.config as follows;

  <system.net>

    <mailSettings>

      <smtp from="[email protected]">

        <network host="smtp.gmail.com"

          port="587"

          userName="[email protected]"

          password="yourgmailpassword"

          enableSsl="true"/>

      </smtp>

    </mailSettings>

  </system.net>

For anonymous access SMTP servers; the Umbraco website IP address(es) must be allowed to use the SMTP server relay and below is how the web.config should be;

<smtp from="[email protected]">

        <network host="yourdomain.outbound1-uk.mailanyone.net" port="25" defaultCredentials="true" enableSsl="false" />

      </smtp>

If you want to you can also override the "from e-mail address" from umbracoSettings.config;

    <notifications>

      <!-- the email that should be used as from mail when umbraco sends a notification -->

      <email>[email protected]</email>

    </notifications>

Now after building your project/deploying your changes to your server, simply login to umbraco with your editor user and update your test content node and and hit Save and send for approval button.

Once all is setup correctly; your publishers who are subscribed to this content node's notifications, will receive an e-mail notification, similar to the following one and simply clicking the link in the e-mail they can publish the umbraco content;

That is all, hope it helps. And remember that you can subscribe your users to different actions as well.