Configuration

Settings live at Settings → Plugins → Yo. None of them is required — a fresh install can save any one without the others being filled in.

The panel

Show the panel — puts the floating panel on every control panel page. Off, messages still arrive: the dashboard widget and the front-end channel keep working, there is just nothing floating.

Where it starts — one of six anchors. Anyone can drag the panel somewhere else, and where they drag it is stored as their preference. This setting is only the corner it starts in for somebody who never has.

Keep him on screen when there is nothing to say — off, the panel appears only when a message is waiting.

Check for new messages every — seconds between polls. 0 stops the panel polling, and messages then appear on the next page load. See why it polls below.

Fade a message after — seconds a non-sticky message stays on screen. Sticky messages ignore it. Hovering one cancels its countdown for good: a message you deliberately looked at should not vanish the moment you look away.

Other plugins

Adopt Craft's own notices — on by default, and the reason Yo is worth installing on a site whose plugins have never heard of it. Craft keeps control panel notifications in three session flashes; Yo drains them before the layout renders and turns each into a message. Notices returned in Ajax response bodies never touch the session, so those are caught in the browser instead.

Turn it off and Craft's own toasts come back, and only plugins that call Yo directly appear in the panel.

The screen also lists every registered message type and channel — including any another plugin added. It is the fastest way to see what is actually installed.

The front end

Front-end channel — off by default. Off, nothing a plugin sends can ever reach your public templates, whatever it asks for.

Put the container in for me — off by default, and this one deserves an explanation. It splices the container before </body> on every front-end page. Where messages sit on a page is a design decision, and a plugin that silently injects a div into somebody's careful layout has made a decision that was not its to make. {{ craft.yo.init() }} is one line and it goes where you want it.

Class prefix — the class names on front-end markup. yo gives you yo-message, yo-message--error and so on. Change it if it collides with your own naming.

Housekeeping

Default time to live — seconds a stored message stays offerable. 0 means forever. A message can override it with ->ttl(). Expired messages go out with Craft's own garbage collection, or on demand with php craft yo/purge.

Note that a null time to live on a stored message follows this setting as it is now, not as it was when the message was sent. Lowering it retires old messages; raising it brings back ones that had gone quiet but were never purged.

Most messages one person can be holding — past this, the oldest are dropped. A plugin in a loop should not be able to fill somebody's screen.

Write every message to the log — switches the log channel on for everything, not just messages that asked for it. Useful while working out which plugin is being noisy.

Why it polls

The panel asks the server for new messages on an interval. It does not hold a Server-Sent Events connection open, and that is deliberate: an open SSE connection occupies a PHP-FPM worker for as long as the tab is open. A five-person editorial team with three tabs each would exhaust a default pool without anybody doing anything wrong.

Everything else about the panel is server-sent — dismissing, acting on and clearing a message all post and get back rendered HTML. It is the connection that is short, not the technique.

If ten seconds is more often than you need, raise it. If you would rather messages only appeared on page loads, set it to 0.

What is stored

Two tables.

yo_messages holds only messages that outlive the request — anything addressed at somebody other than the person who triggered it. A message for the current request rides in the session and never costs a write, which is why a plugin can call Yo on every save without anyone regretting it.

yo_deliveries holds one row per person per message per channel, created when something first happens to that person's copy. A message to four hundred people is one row until somebody reads it.

Nothing about a visitor is stored for the front-end channel beyond what Craft already knows: an anonymous visitor's messages live in their session and nowhere else.