Feb 5, 2013 ~ 1 min read

Drupal and how to disable notifications for programmatic node updates

• drupal

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More than often, we Drupal developers find ourselves doing programmatic node modifications via the

node_save()

function. If you’re doing that as well as have messaging and notifications modules enabled in your site then given the case that your users have subscribed to content-type updates and you’re doing these ‘behind the scenes’

node_save()

stuff then you’re effectively spamming them with email updates each time you run that function.

To mitigate this issue, when saving a node programmatically you can set an attribute for the notifications module to understand that it needs not to send updates for this operation. It’s a quick and easy one:

function probably_your_hook(&$node) { // ... code ...

// Disable announcements for this operation $node->notifications_content_disable = 1; node_save($node);

// ... code ... }