Sending Category Notifications with MT-Notifier
If you use MT-Notifier to send category subscriptions, then you should be aware that there may be an issue with sending notifications to subscribers based on the way that you create your entries.
Because Movable Type assigns categories only after the entry is completely saved, it means that if you do not save your entry in unpublished (or draft) mode with the categories assigned, your category subscriptions will not be processed.
Luckily, there is a very simply way to get around this problem. Simply assign the appropriate categories to your entry, and then save your entry in unpublished mode. Then change the status to published and save it again. That's all it takes and your notifications should go out as normal.
Comments
Chad,
I have purchased and installed Notifier on several installations and always appreciate the thorough documentation and ease of implementation and use, especially on MT 4.01. On previous blog implementations I used a combination of Notifier and NotifyWho, the latter to notify administartors of ALL comment activity without having to subscribe to each entry. It does not appear that NotifyWho is upgraded to work with MT 4+.
A Blog-site I recently installed has several authors and three (3) administrators (I am one). Is there a simple hack to Notifier.pm (or someplace else) to add what I would call a pseudo subscription to ALL comments for, in this case, administrators?
A future enhancement you may want to consider is allowing users the option to subscribe to ALL new comments in a Blog.
Any help or pointing me in the right direction is immensely appreciated.
Posted by: Merv Forney | April 29, 2008 10:12 PM
Hi Merv -
There is a somewhat simple hack, but there isn't really an easy way to do it only for "administrators", which is one of the reasons that it's not in MT-Notifier now.
First, how to do it. Open Plugin.pm and locate the notify_comment routine. Remove the line that says entry_id => $entry_id and you're set. It will notify anyone subscribed to that blog of the comment.
Now, the first problem: There is no easy way to turn it on and off - you can notify of all comments, or you can notify of some comments. Not either/or. So that's an issue.
The second problem: There is not really a way to do it for only administrators. I have thought about doing it by checking to see if the subscribed address is for someone in the author table, and that may work to some degree, but it's not ideal - and if there is someone who wants all comments, it doesn't help.
So really it would need to be on the subscription record or something, but because you can have multiple subscriptions per blog, it would mean that you could have multiple records for the same blog to send all comments, which creates yet another issue.
Back to your question - if you just want to use it for administrator notification, make that change and you're done. Otherwise, it's still something I'm trying to work through. Sorry. :)
Posted by: Chad Everett | April 30, 2008 9:10 AM