Content Notify 1.5

Content Notify was released last week with one majorly requested feature, a few new things, and some breaking changes. Let’s dive in.

AND/OR Logic

A highly requested feature dating back to the beginnings of the plugin. Previously, when a user created a subscription that contain multiple taxonomies, each with at least one term chosen, the plugin would use OR logic to determine if an alert should be sent. This means that if any ONE term matches a subscription, it would generate an alert. This works well for subscriptions with one term and one taxonomy but not so well if you really want to create a very specific subscription. As such, the plugin has been developed to use AND logic too which will only send out an alert if ALL taxonomies have at least one matching term. This means you can create larger, more advanced subscriptions using a combination of AND logic between taxonomies and OR logic between terms within those taxonomies. This is all done by adding a simple logic="AND" parameter in the cn_form shortcode. Where no logic is provided, OR logic is used. Powerful stuff.

Media Subscriptions

Media (or attachments as WordPress calls it), can now be subscribed to. As this post type works slightly differently to other post types, I had to spend a while ensuring that I used the right hooks when checking for updated or uploaded media items. It was actually quite straight-forward in the end, and adds a nice feature that wasn’t highly requested, but was easy to add and will probably be used more than I appreciate. Like any other post type, you can exclude this from your forms should you not want users being able to create a Subscription for the ‘attachment’ post type.

Breaking Change: Filters Replace with Options

Most filters have now been removed in favour of dedicated options within the Subscriptions > Settings screen. This is so much easier to use now and allows greater control over excluding post types, authors, and taxonomies from form fields, as well as permitting empty terms to appear in forms too.

Minor Change

The text on the privacy policy checkbox has been updated and translation files regenerated in order to be more easily readable and compliant with the GDPR and other data protection laws/regulations/legislations around the world.

What’s Next?

Progress has slowed a little lately and that’s for a few reasons. I’ve had to spend more time on my other WordPress plugin, Better Notifications for WP due to an uptick in users. I’m also in the process of moving house and this has demanded a lot of my time that I wanted to spend on Content Notify’s development. As soon as things are more settled, I’ll be working hard on the plugin again though.
The next big features that are planned are a proper drag and drop form builder to do away with using the cn_form shortcode, along with some way of being able to customise emails, even if basic for the time being.

Until next time.