This release seemed to take forever and yet, I released it bang on time again. Each release takes about a month to produce at the moment however, I can’t imagine this will be for long – I have some big plans for the first part of next year and they won’t be easy, but they will be awesome. For now though, here’s what was released in Content Notify 1.4.

Disable Name Fields

My popular demand, you can now register with just an email address – you no longer have to enter your name as well. I had to check this was all legit in the eyes of the GDPR, etc. before I made this change but it seems to be all good and now, it’s in the plugin. You can switch the name fields off by using the shortcode parameter user_names="false". If you’re logged in and the user_fields="false" shortcode parameter is set, the user_names field won’t have any affect.

Disable Privacy Policy Checkbox

Also by popular demand, you can now hide the privacy policy checkbox that showed at the bottom of the form. This is only hidden for logged in users as they may have already accepting privacy and/or terms and conditions when registering for the site. You can switch the privacy field off by using the shortcode parameter privacy_policy="false".

Admin Email Alert

If you’re the site admin, you can now receive an email alert when a subscriber verifies their subscription. Since I implemented Content Notify on this site (scroll to below this post to see the subscription form), I realised that I didn’t know if I had any subscribers or not – I would have to log into my site to see them under the Subscriptions menu in the WP Admin. No longer!

Improvements to Email Alerts

The email alerts now contain a featured image, if there is one, along with the details of a subscription. This is handy so that if you’re a subscriber, you can remind yourself of what you signed up for. This information is also included in the email alert to the admin, as mentioned above.

Major Fixes for Elementor & My Listing Theme

These two popular offerings have been what’s taken the most amount of time to fix in this release. Both were causing multiple duplicate alerts to send out and weren’t allowing alerts to send out to the correct subscribers. This turned out to be because they were saving the initial post using a publish action, and then following this up with multiple update actions. This required suppressing the initial alert on first publish, looping over the update actions until the process was completed, and then sending out the publish alert then instead. This allowed Content Notify to send out a single alert, and capture all of the information, such as the desired taxonomy terms, in order to satisfy a subscription correctly. This has had the unfortunate side-effect of setting the requirement for the plugin to the latest version of WordPress (5.6 at time of writing) as this contained a new feature which allowed me to get this all working. Not ideal, but so far, this hasn’t been an issue and having everything up-to-date isn’t such a bad thing either.

In addition to this, there have been various improvements, fixes, and alterations to the CSS in the plugin, and how the CSS and javascript load. There’s a handy option to force the load of these assets on every page, should you run into issues getting the form to look or function correctly because of a conflicting theme or plugin, for example. This can be found in Subscriptions > Settings > Styling.

And that’s it! If you purchased Content Notify this year, please accept my greatest thanks for helping support the plugin whilst it’s so young 🙂

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
Jack