Content Notify 1.2

Wow! It seems I’m releasing updates to Content Notify like clockwork! Versions 1, 1.1, and now 1.2, have been released almost exactly a month apart.
Version 1.2, released today, will come as a very welcome update.

Version 1.2

HTML Emails

Gone are the boring emails. From now on, everything is sent as nicely formatted HTML emails. You can still send emails in plain text should you wish though, and there’s an option for that in the plugin settings.
You can also add your logo to the top of emails, and your business details to the bottom of emails. This helps with making email alerts much more compliant in the eyes of the GDPR, etc. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a lot better than previous versions of the plugin.

Verify / Unsubscribe Feedback on a New Page

Previously, if you clicked a ‘Verify’ or ‘Unsubscribe’ link in an email, it took you to the homepage and showed you a Bootstrap alert at the top of the page. This worked fine for the most part, but it wasn’t very slick. From now on, new plugin activations will create a page, add a new [[cn_feedback]] shortcode to it, and set it to be the page used for displaying information pertaining to verify/unsubscribe links. By default, this page is called ‘Subscription Messages’, but you can change this to anything, so long as it has the [[cn_feedback]] shortcode and is set in the plugin settings.

Fallbacks for Everything

I’ve spent time trying to make sure that the plugin always falls back to something. I don’t want anything breaking just because someone hasn’t set something or set something incorrectly by accident. The logo will default to the one set in the Customiser, for example. If that’s not there, it defaults to the site title. There are lots of these little things that will probably go largely unnoticed but I hope it adds to the overall stability and sturdy-feeling of the plugin.

General Improvements and Bug Fixes

I’ve tried to make the post_type, authors, and new status shortcode parameters as robust as I can. Fields can now auto detect the current post settings and hide themselves where set to do so, making for a much cleaner form and a more guided subscription experience.

I’ve also fixed a handful of bugs – some big, some small.

What’s Next

Version 1.3 will be a bit of a mishmash of improvements but ultimately, I want to provide users with a better way to manage all of their subscriptions when logged in.

Until next time.