MagicBell offers several features to help you build common notification patterns. Underpinning these features are a few foundational elements that we have painstakingly crafted to be simple and far-reaching. We call them primitives. Understanding them is critical to leveraging MagicBell for your product.
Some features involve multiple primitives, and some primitives show up in many places. That is by design! We believe fewer, more well-designed, interconnected primitives lead to a better experience as you work on your notification system. They enable you to form a strong and coherent mental model that improves with each new feature you build. As we build out MagicBell, we'll add new primitives deliberately, making the existing primitives more useful.
For example, the Category and Channel primitives power notification preferences, and Category and Topics power unsubscriptions.
If you are currently exploring the landscape of notification providers, we suggest paying attention to the primitives offered by different providers.
They will impact how closely (and joyfully) you can translate your product ideas into working features. Suppose you are building a social network and
want to offer users one-click unsubscriptions from updates on specific discussions. In this case, you will need a primitive that enables storing a user
preference at that level of granularity. In MagicBell, that is a topic subscription. If you are using a provider that does not offer this primitive,
you will need to build it yourself.