Dear All, We are sending a lot of alert messages through Koha like book renewal, hold, overdue, etc. So how can we make this possible to send birthday wishes from Koha? The system should match the Koha server date with patron birthday record/field and send a wish as per library defined format like other email alerts? The case may be similar to already available email alerts to patron before their account expire in system.
Requirements: Nowadays clients send Birthday Wishes through SMS/email alerts from Banks or other organizations on their Birthday. It makes the clients feel happy due to personalize the message on a specific day. The library may also send the same to bring patrons close to the library and build good repo about librarians. Test: 1. Patron fields already contain the date of birth field in their data entry module 2. The system may regularly check the date of birth field and if a match with server date is found a Birthday message should deliver. 3. The message content should be customizable like other email alert service 4. There should be an option to use or not to use this option Hope the above idea is good and it is possible to do similar to sending the message alert before the expiry of the patron registration date.
I am interested to develop this patch.
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I like this idea too. Would also like to see a highlighted alert on the staff side, and the same birthday message displayed when a patron logs in to the OPAC.
Hi all, I think libraries here would be a bit critical about a feature like this (GDPR, patron privacy concerns), so it would be great if we could make this driven by a system preference.
I had assumed that a preference would be a given, as with anything else.
I think we may provide option to patrons as well either to receive birthday message or not like other messages book transaction message.
I agree patrons should have the ability to opt out. Some people find these messages annoying.
In my opinion birthday wishes (if taken seriously) are something personal. So you can't order a program to congratulate people automatically. Unless in very special cases I would consider this plain Spam that noone has waited for - except the possible sender. However, I also agree patrons have to have the ability to opt out.
Of course this should be an optional feature, but what we think is not a good idea from our own context is maybe something very common or even expected somewhere else.
Wouldn't the patron emailer cron job work for this?
I´ve created a script in perl that sends birthday emails using a report that provides patron info to script. It shall run daily in a cronjob. See https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Scripts_Library#Send_birthday_greetings_to_patrons
(In reply to Caroline Cyr La Rose from comment #11) > Wouldn't the patron emailer cron job work for this? Yeah, the patron emailer could totally do this. A dedicated process just for birthday notices could be simpler to use than the patron emailer, but this is doable now.