Everitz Consulting

With the recent release of Movable Type, it has come to my attention that some of you may receive extra notifications sent if you have users subscribed to receive notifications when new entries are added to your blog. This appears to be due to something in the upgrade process, as near as I can tell, saving entries during the upgrade, which triggers a save through MT-Notifier, thinking that it might have something new to send.

If you want to avoid new notifications being sent out, and you are a registered user of MT-Notifier version four, drop me a line prior to upgrading. There is a version of MT-Notifier that I have which will allow you to create history records for all of your subscribers, effectively marking all of your existing subscribers as if they have already been notified of all entries on your system. A bit of a hack, really, but it should work to alleviate this problem.

I have a thought on how to fix the category issue with MT-Notifier (where you have to save it in unpublished mode with categories, then publish it before saving in published mode). But I need a couple people who can check it out. You're welcome to try it if you have a lot of subscribers, but it's probably best if you don't have too many, just in case. Nothing should break, but I'm curious if we can get it to work without having to worry about if you have to save in unpublished mode first. Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks to Mirco Macrelli, there is now an Italian (it) translation available for MT-Notifier v4.01. If you have licensed MT-Notifier version four and would like to update your copy, simply download it again. If you haven't, why haven't you done so already? If you'd like to contribute by adding another language to MT-Notifier, you can take an existing language file from the distribution, translating it and sending it to me!

Those of you who are waiting (patiently, I'm sure!) for an update to MT-Notifier that will run under Movable Type version 4 will be rewarded very soon. I have been hard at work in the last week or so, ironing out all the issues that remain, trying to make sure that everything will work as expected. That's the good news.

The bad news is that it will very likely require MT 4.01 - which entered release candidate (RC) status earlier today. That means that if you're already running MT4, you will need to upgrade at the very least to RC1. Sorry, but I can't control MT, and some of the bugs that I've found are in MT, and will require MT 4.01 to fix everything. General functions may work in MT4, but it won't officially be supported.

There will not be any significant new features in this release, as it will simply provide a new interface to the application, and allow for future enhancements to be built on the new framework provided by the MT4 platform. As such, all existing licensed users of MT-Notifier will very likely be eligible for a complimentary upgrade (this is still being worked out), at least for a transition period. Because additional functionality will not be added to the existing software, if you want to continue to grow with MT-Notifier, you should license the software now - chances are also good that the price may go up in the future, and this could save you some money in the long run!

Some people have reported issues with the 3.31 release version of Movable Type, so we are working with them to create an update to MT-Notifier to fix any problems and will post it when it's ready.

Update: Version 3.4.6 has been released and should address all known outstanding issues.

The download link for MT-Notifier has been fixed to include the correct file. If you downloaded version 3.4.5 and had problems with the installation, you may want to get a fresh copy. Sorry for the difficulties.

You may have heard about the Yahoo! Small Business hosting solutions.

You may have heard about their web hosting packages, and you might even know that they offer Movable Type on some of their offerings.

But did you know that MT-Notifier is offered on these packages? From my understanding, it is version 1.4.1 (modified), but it may be better than nothing.

Thanks to the able assistance of Ryan Hartzog, I've put together some steps on installing MT-Notifier in an environment using Windows 2003 and IIS. There are only three small changes, and we walk you through each of them in the MT-Notifier installation instructions. Enjoy!

Update: Thanks to enhancements in Movable Type, even these small changes are no longer needed (effective with version 3.4.5).

The download link for MT-Notifier has been fixed so that it points to the correct place. Thanks to Cameron Bulock for pointing it out. Let me know if you run into any other issues.