> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.flowx.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Notification Templates

> You can add Notification Templates to your custom FlowX.AI deployment. The plugin will **enhance the core platform capabilities with functionality specific to sending various notifications**.

The Notification Templates feature offers the following features:

* Email notifications
* SMS templates to mobile devices

<Info>
  To use the Notification Templates feature to send notifications, via SMS channel, a third party provider for SMS communication is needed, for example, [Twilio](https://www.twilio.com/).
</Info>

* Forward custom notifications to external outgoing services
* Generate and validate OTP passwords for user identity verification

You can also use the Notification Templates feature to track what notifications have been sent and to whom.

Let's go through the steps needed to deploy and set up the Notification Templates feature:

## Using Notification Templates

After deploying the Notification Templates feature in your infrastructure, you can start sending notifications by configuring related actions in your **process definitions**.

Before adding the corresponding **actions** in your process definition, you will need to follow a few steps:

* make sure all prerequisites are prepared, for example, the [notification templates](./managing-notification-templates) you want to use
* the database is configured properly
* for each **Kafka** event type, you will need two Kafka topics:
  * one for the request sent from the FlowX Engine to the Notification Templates feature
  * one for the corresponding reply

<Card title="Kafka configuration for Notifications plugin" href="../../../../../setup-guides/notifications-plugin-setup#kafka-configuration" icon="gears">
  **DEVELOPER**
</Card>

<Info>
  The topic names configured for the plugin should match the ones used when configuring the engine and when adding plugin-related process actions:

  * FlowX Engine is listening for messages on topics with names of a certain pattern, make sure to use an outgoing topic name that matches the pattern configured in the Engine

  For more information, see the [Kafka configuration guide](../../../../../setup-guides/flowx-engine-setup-guide/engine-setup#configuring-kafka).

  * to make a request to the plugin, the process definition needs to have an action of type `Kafka send` that has an action parameter with key `topicName` and the needed topic name as a value
  * to receive a reply from the plugin, the process definition needs to have a receiving node with a node value with key `topicName` and the topic name as the value
</Info>

After all the setup is in place, you can start adding custom actions to the processes.

Let's go through a few examples. These examples cover both the configuration part, and the integration with the engine for all the use cases.

<CardGroup>
  <Card title="Managing notification templates" href="managing-notification-templates" />

  <Card title="Send a notification" href="sending-a-notification" />

  <Card title="Send an email with attachements" href="sending-an-email-with-attachments" />

  <Card title="Forward notifications to an external system" href="forwarding-notifications-to-an-external-system" />

  <Card title="OTP flow" href="otp-flow" />
</CardGroup>