Adding a Notification

Hi

For the longest time, I've been adding notifications into EasySocial by manually inserting a record into #__social_notifications, because I can never get the instructions on the documentation to work. Now I am about to release a new extension and I would like to make full use of the EasySocial API, but I still can't seem to get it to work.

Can somebody explain the docs in detail? I have the .alert rule file in the right folder, but I'm not sure if I've named it right (I just named it <component-name>.alert). For the record, I've scanned it in the EasySocial backend and it was detected with no problem. However, based on the names of the other rule files used by EasySocial itself, it would seem that the naming of the rule file matters, but nowhere on the docs did it mention what or how.

Here's a list of issues not covered by the docs, or covered but very vaguely:
1) How does the rule file work and how exactly does EasySocial interact with it? How should it be named?

2) For each rule, what does "element" and "rule" mean, and how does EasySocial interact with it later?

3) In the logging doc (http://stackideas.com/docs/easysocial/developers/notifications/logging) it says "$cmd - (Required) This should be the same command that is defined in the rule file". No where on the Rule File doc did it mention anything about "command".

4) For the $options array, please explain what 'context_ids' and 'context_type' are, and how EasySocial interact with these settings.

5) I am assuming, based on some parts of the doc, that the tags {actor} and {target} are supported. Are there other tags that are supported? I ask this because sometimes, a notification may contain multiple links to other specific content. Do we manually insert the hyperlink into the 'title', or do we use tags?

6) If you can elaborate on the $emailOptions as well, that would be most useful!

Thanks in advanced!