feat: uncheck the "Send notification" checkbox when a post is published

[sherwinski]

Description

After a post is published or updated, uncheck the "Send notification when post is published or updated" checkbox. This is to prevent unintentionally sending subsequent notifications if say, a post author or other plugin were to edit the post. With this change, plugin consumers will need to opt into sending notifications to users after the post is initially published.

Details

On first attempt, we tried simply unchecking the "Send notification" checkbox when a user saves a post. This quickly proved to be an issue as the checkbox state is used in determining whether a OneSignal notification request should be make. A "quick and dirty" way to get around this is to add a wait between when a post is saved and when the checkbox is unchecked. Unsurprisingly, this is not a good approach as external factors (such as network speeds) can cause these actions to happen out of sync. A better approach would ideally wait to uncheck the box once we can guarantee that the notification action has successfully completed, which requires coordination between the client and server.

This PR achieves this effect by:

• Adding a "notification status" global that tracks if a notification has been successfully sent yet.
• Creating an internal endpoint that is available to both the client and server via a property on the global object.
  • This endpoint incorporates security measures so that only users with permission to edit the post can create push notification requests.
• Polling this endpoint once every 1.5 seconds whenever a post is saved, which will return the current notification status.
• Unchecking the "Send notification" checkbox once the poll indicates that a notification has been sent, guaranteeing that these steps are taken in the correct order.
• Resetting the notification status metadata field as a final cleanup step.

Demo

v2 Demo

uncheck.send.notif.checkbox.mov

v3 Demo Gutenberg

uncheck.send.notif.checkbox.v3.gutenberg.mov

v3 Demo Classic

uncheck.send.notif.checkbox.v3.classic.mov

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This change is 

[sherwinski]

Open questions/concerns:

[marclucraft]

This might be better solved using PHP (in onesignal-notification.php) rather than JS client-side (since posts might be created automatically / remotely)

Something along the lines of; if this is a post update, don't do anything

Could also add another option in the Settings screen "Automatically send notifications on Post Update", so the above would become: if this is a post update, don't do anything – unless "Automatically send notifications on Post Update" is checked

[rgomezp]

It's fragile to rely on a 3rd party button class name to listen to. Especially since this can potentially change between WP versions.

Instead, we can use the 'core/editor' API on wp.data to listen to changes in the post status and uncheck the checkbox that way.

[sherwinski]

One small thing that I noticed is that even though the checkbox does get unchecked, the options field underneath doesn't get hidden as it would when you manually click on the checkbox.

Screen.Recording.2025-01-15.at.5.32.06.PM.mov

[sherwinski]

@rgomezp Hmm now there are different issues with the behavior:

• A notification isn't sent the first time a post is published
  • My best guess as to why is that it could be related to this
• A notification is sent when the post is updated but the checkbox UI doesn't update unless the page is refreshed
  • May just need a call to updateUI() when a post is updated, assuming that flow is any different than publishing for the first time

Screen.Recording.2025-01-16.at.11.33.41.AM.mov

[rfischmann]

Any ETA on this, guys? This is a huge blocker for us. We're still on plugin version 2.4.4 only because of this.

[sherwinski]

Hey @rfischmann, thanks for checking in. We're pushing to release this soon, hopefully no later than in two weeks time.

[sherwinski]

Closing in favor of #348