BuddyPress Desktop Notification

My latest plugin has just been released on wordpress.org: “BuddyPress Desktop Notification“. If you are running a BuddyPress community, you can use this plugin in order to display new messages, activities and friendship requests for your users.

How this works? After a user logged in, the browser will ask for the permission to display desktop notifications. This works with most modern browsers (see a list here). While usually notification plugins show a pop-up or something similar, which are displayed only in the browser, desktop notifications also pops up, if the browser is minimized:

It’s quite a lightweight plugin, but it might cause some traffic because it produces an ajax request every five seconds for every logged in user who enabled the notifications. I decided to make this plugin configurable via filters and not using another admin menu page, since – to be honest – I am not such a fan of overloaded admin menus. If you are using this plugin and it produces too much load, you can reduce the request interval with the following piece of code:

More information on my latest plugin can be found on the website.