Content Notify 1.10 has just been released with some great new features. This update focuses on subscription management, namely: pausing, verifying, un-verifying, and re-verifying subscriptions, as well as another method of preventing subscription spam.
Pausing Subscriptions
This feature was beginning to be requested more and more and so I thought now was a good time to implement this: Subscribers that have a user account can now pause their subscriptions from the ‘My Subscriptions’ page via a new button next to the ‘Unsubscribe’ button.
Admins can also pause subscriptions via a toggle when editing any subscription in the WordPress Admin.
I couldn’t find a good way to make this work for non-WordPress users but if I work out a nice way with good UX, I’ll add this in the future.
Bulk Actions
The ability to bulk manage subscribers is incredibly important if you have a lot of them. From this release onwards, you can bulk verify and bulk un-verify subscribers from the Subscriptions > All Subscriptions > Bulk Actions menu in the WordPress Admin.
Re-send Verification Email
The admin can now re-send a verification email for a subscription, if it hasn’t been verified, in order to prompt the subscriber to complete their subscription so they can start receiving content alerts. This can be done from the new ‘Admin Options’ meta box that appears on the right of the screen when editing a subscription in the WordPress Admin.
New Options
There are three new options in the plugin:
Choose which email address any admin alerts should be sent, such as after a subscriber verifies their subscription. This can be found in Subscriptions > Settings > Sending. This is handy should the main site admin not be the person in charge of subscriptions because, for example, you have a marketing person who works on this aspect of your site instead.
The other option is for adding names and email address to a ‘Banned List’ to prevent them from creating a subscription. This can be found in Subscriptions > Settings > Security. This, in addition to a CAPTCHA, can greatly reduce the amount of spam you may get on your subscription forms.
You can now remove the ‘Subscription Options’ meta box from any post type by adding it to the new option found in Subscriptions > Settings > General.
Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements
This release comes with a small array of bug fixes and minor improvements, namely: featured images weren’t being output in alerts, and the way the plugin enqueues styles and scripts is now a bit better. There is also support for the Vehica theme.
What’s Next
The 1.9 release included a way for admins to prevent alerts from being sent out when publishing/updating a post/page/custom post type but unfortunately, at the moment, this only works when using the Classic Editor, which is still used by a huge number of users but not particularly helpful if you’re using the Block Editor, Gutenberg plugin, or another method, such as Elementor, or a more advanced theme.
In order to fix this, I need to learn *a lot* about javascript and the new WordPress block building system. I really want to do this as it’ll have a massive impact on how good the plugin can be moving forward however, It’ll also take a lot of time and resources away from developing other important features, such as full email customisation, and providing better support for things like having multiple forms on a page, and submitting forms via AJAX (no re-loading of the page) instead of the current method. Regardless, this functionality will be fully implemented in a future update.
Until next time.
