Protocols and Addresses

A protocol is what lets us sort out and make sense of contact information in django-vox. Classic examples of a “protocol” are things like email, SMS, and XMPP. You can also have proprietary protocols like Slack webhooks, or things that use Google or Apple’s push notifications.

Each protocol has it’s own kind of addresses. When a contact is sent a message, django-vox automatically selects a backend that matches the available contacts (and addresses by extension) for that protocol.

Activity

ID: activity

This protocol is for Activity Streams (and only slightly supported ActivityPub). Message are stored locally in the database and are retrievable from an inbox. Setting this up is a bit of work, see the section on Activities.

Email

ID: email

The email protocol is really straightforward, the contact’s address is just the email address.

SMS

ID: sms

The contact’s address for SMS is the contact’s phone number in E.164 format. It’s recommended to use django-phonenumber-field if you want to store these numbers in a database.

Twitter

Addresses for the twitter protocol can take two forms:

  1. An empty string means the message will get posted as a status update for the account specified in the setting.
  2. Anything else will be sent as a direct message to the user with that handle. You shouldn’t prefix an ‘@’ to the address and you need to have the correct permissions set in order for this to work.

Webhook Protocols

While webhooks aren’t typically a convenient way to contact end-users, they can be pretty useful for setting up site contacts. Because of the templating system, you can be quite flexible in the way you set them up.

Name ID Purpose
JSON Webhook json-webhook Generic JSON data (specified in template)
Slack Webhook slack-webhook Posting messages to Slack

XMPP

XMPP (or Jabber) is a standardized, decentralized chat system. The contact’s address should just be their XMPP address (or JID, as it’s sometimes called).