Content Notify 1.16

This release is quick off the heals of the last one but includes a very important and highly requested feature: Digests.

Digest Email Alerts

Content Notify has always had the ability to send alerts immediately but, what if you wanted to allow subscribers to choose a different frequency. What if you publish a lot and they only want to be notified once a day? What if you publish infrequently and they only want to be sent alerts weekly or monthly? Well, from Content Notify 1.16, they can now choose to receive alerts immediately, or as a digest email alert sent daily, weekly, or monthly.

Digest Email Template

This feature comes with a new email template which will stack alerts on top of each other into a single email. It builds off the simple, and existing, ‘immediate’ customisable email template so any custom HTML or CSS that you might be using, should be easy to port over to the new template (or share between them if you want to get really advanced).

Enable / Disable Digest Form Field

As with most form fields found in Content Notify, you can choose whether or not you want to allow potential subscribers to see the alert frequency field in a form. This is acheived via a toggle in the Form Editor called ‘Show Alert Frequency Options’.

Digest Settings

Digests come with a couple of new settings for when to send out email alerts.
You can choose which day to send weekly alerts and whether you want monthly alerts to be sent on the first or last day of the month.
All digest features rely on a working and functioning WP Cron. A good primer on making sure the WP Cron is working can be found here.

Documentation

As with all Content Notify features, full details can be found in the documentation.

What’s Next

I’m working on some small improvements for 1.16.1 and 1.16.2 which should flesh out a few minor features to the point where I can begin work on 1.17. Plans are still formulating but I have some exiciting ideas for Content Notify in the pipeline and can’t wait to see how they come about over the course of the year.

Until next time.