NotifyCrew – Team reminders for Slack

Description

NotifyCrew is a production-ready WordPress plugin that lets organizations schedule, manage, and deliver team reminders directly to Slack channels. It combines a full-featured admin interface with an optional Google-authenticated frontend portal so that both admins and team members can create reminders.

Key Features

• Slack Integration — Supports both Incoming Webhooks and Bot Tokens (chat.postMessage). Credentials are encrypted at rest using libsodium.
• Team Management — Create teams, assign WordPress users or email-only members, and configure per-team Slack channels, mention tags (@channel, @here), and quick-schedule presets.
• Reminder Lifecycle — Create, edit, delete, and filter reminders by team and status (Pending, Sent, Completed). Each reminder tracks its delivery history.
• Automatic Retry with Exponential Backoff — Failed Slack deliveries are automatically retried up to 5 times with increasing delays (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 minutes). Manual retry is also available from the admin list.
• Admin Email Notifications — After 2+ consecutive delivery failures, the site admin receives an email alert with a direct link to check Slack settings.
• Admin Dashboard Notices — Recent Slack delivery failures are surfaced as dismissible notices in the WordPress admin area.
• Quick Schedule — Per-team configurable hour presets (e.g., “In 4 hours”, “In 12 hours”, “In 48 hours”) for fast reminder creation without picking exact dates.
• Frontend Reminder Portal — A beautiful, Google-authenticated shortcode-based portal ([ncrw_frontend_reminder_form]) lets team members create and manage reminders from any page.
• View-Only Reminder Portal — A read-only shortcode ([ncrw_upcoming_reminders]) lets team members browse upcoming reminders without editing.
• Google OAuth Authentication — Frontend portals verify identity via Google Sign-In tokens. Only email domains you whitelist can access the portal.
• Headless REST API — External frontend apps can use the ncrw/v1/portal/* REST endpoints with API key authentication and Google token verification for fully decoupled deployments.
• Per-Team Slack Channels — Each team can have its own Slack channel. A global fallback channel is used when no team-specific channel is configured.
• Per-Team Mention Tags — Append @channel or @here mentions to every Slack reminder sent for a specific team.
• Rich Slack Messages — Reminders are delivered as Block Kit messages with headers, scheduled time, task/ticket links, submitter info, and optional notes.
• Complete Audit Log — Every reminder event (created, sent, retry scheduled, completed) is logged with timestamps.
• Safe Uninstall — Plugin data (tables, options, transients) is only deleted on uninstall if you explicitly opt in via Settings → Data Cleanup.
• WP Cron Self-Healing — The 5-minute cron schedule auto-recovers if it is ever cleared or fails to register during activation.
• Fully Translatable — All user-facing strings use WordPress i18n functions with the notifycrew text domain. A .pot file is included.

Admin Menu Structure

After activation, a Reminders menu (with a bell icon) appears in the WordPress admin sidebar with the following sub-pages:

• All Reminders — Filterable list of all reminders with team/status filters, pagination, retry, edit, and delete actions.
• Add Reminder — Create or edit a reminder with team selection, quick-schedule, date/time picker, task link, and comments.
• Teams — Create teams, manage members (WordPress users or email-only), configure Slack channel, mention tag, and quick-schedule hours.
• Settings — Configure Slack credentials (webhook or bot token), visibility, frontend portal, Google OAuth, allowed domains, API key, and uninstall cleanup.

Shortcodes

• [ncrw_frontend_reminder_form] — Renders the full-featured reminder creation + management portal with Google Sign-In authentication.
• [ncrw_upcoming_reminders] — Renders a read-only view of upcoming team reminders with Google Sign-In authentication, status filters, and sorting.

REST API Endpoints

All endpoints are under the ncrw/v1 namespace:

• POST /ncrw/v1/process — Trigger immediate processing of due reminders (admin only).
• GET /ncrw/v1/reminders — List reminders with team/status/pagination filters (logged-in users).
• POST /ncrw/v1/reminders/{id}/retry — Queue a manual retry for a failed reminder (team admin).
• POST /ncrw/v1/portal/bootstrap — Bootstrap a portal session: verify Google token, return teams and reminders (public with API key + Google token).
• POST /ncrw/v1/portal/reminder — Create or update a reminder from an external frontend (public with API key + Google token).

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8 or higher
• PHP 7.4 or higher
• PHP sodium extension (included by default in PHP 7.2+)
• A Slack workspace with an Incoming Webhook URL or a Bot Token with chat:write scope

External services

This plugin connects to the following third-party services:

Slack API (chat.postMessage)

This service delivers team reminders to Slack channels. It is activated every time a scheduled reminder is due or manually retried.

Data sent: team name, reminder title, task/ticket link, submitter email address, reminder notes, and timestamp.
This service is provided by Slack Technologies: terms of service, privacy policy.

Google OAuth / Sign-In

This service authenticates users on the optional frontend reminder portal and view-only portal. It is activated when a user loads a portal page or submits a reminder form.

Data sent: Google ID token (for identity verification only).
This service is provided by Google LLC: terms of service, privacy policy.