Devon Ostendorf

Hi werdpres,

I’m sure it will not come as a huge surprise to you but I have decided to call it quits on WordPress development (as I am also moving away from using WordPress personally). I am working on an “official” notice, to post here, before long, but I don’t want to string you along (any longer than I already have ?? ). Thanks again for the compliments and I am sorry that you haven’t found a suitable alternative (at least, as of your last comment).

Sorry,
Devon

Hi DJF3,

Since this is just a warning, it will not affect the plugin’s behavior.

As you’ve probably noticed (by the “This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress” banner), I have been away from WordPress development for quite some time now, which is why this plugin has not been updated/tested against the current versions of WordPress and PHP. Honestly, I do not know if I will be repairing this particular issue, in an official release, due to the very limited bandwidth I have for plugin maintenance these days. The code change itself is very simple and, if you’d like to make it yourself, I can point you toward what needs to be changed.

Hope this helps,
Devon

Hi newtech1,

Glad to hear things are working now!

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Heather,

I wish I had an answer for you but I have not had much appetite for going deep on Gutenberg. I do not like what I’ve seen from it so far and have installed the Classic Editor plugin so I can keep (very) sporadically blogging myself.

I have no plans, at the present, to build Gutenberg compatibility in to Post Notif so I’d suggest you consider an alternative post notification plugin that does support it.

Sorry,
Devon

Hi werdpres,

Again, thanks very much for your compliments about Post Notif! I am reserving judgment on Gutenberg, as I have admittedly not spent much time at all experimenting with it. But, I do know there are a lot of people who would prefer to leave the editor as-is, since it is familiar and suits their needs.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi werdpres,

First of all, I am sorry for taking so very long to respond to this. As mentioned before, I have been away from WordPress since November and my notifications (via RSS), that are supposed to be alerting me anytime someone posts to the support forum, are lagging for some reason.

Anyway, I truly appreciate the kind words and your understanding about my hesitance regarding continuing to work on WP plugins. I am still not totally decided on how I am going to proceed immediate-term, but will make a decision shortly.

In the meantime, as to what you’ve identified, while it is certainly possible you’ve found a previously unidentified bug, I suspect the problem is likely a side effect of the (less-than-optimally implemented) “Undo Delete” capability. Namely, in order to provide “Undo” functionality when you delete your subscribers, the subscribers are only initially “soft deleted” (marked as “to be deleted”) on the subscribers table. They are physically deleted when you next return to either the “View Subscribers” or “Manage Subscribers” page. If you went straight back to the “Import Subscribers” page, after “deleting” your subscribers, you WOULD run into mysterious “duplicate subscriber” errors.

It sounds like you got the end result you needed by taking the brute force approach of uninstalling and re-installing. I apologize for driving you to that solution. I need to figure out how to cleanly add the explanation above to the FAQ, in order to save others from encountering the same issue. Thank you for bringing it to light!

Thanks,
Devon

Hi 2gen,

Sorry to hear you’re having problems with your MySQL backups, due to large table volume, as a result of data Post Notif is generating. This is the first I’ve heard of this happening, which makes me think that not many people are using the shortcode functionality. ??

As you may have seen from my pinned post, I have been away from WordPress for a month and a half and expect to remain so until the end of the year. So I am not in a position to attempt to re-create this issue in order to debug it. If I remember correctly, the code stores a new set of attributes each time you specify a unique (system-wide) ID in your shortcode call. Which makes me think you use shortcodes a lot AND you specify a unique ID each time?

I think one possible solution would be to determine how many unique sets of widget configuration you have/need. Then assign them unique IDs. And then go through your shortcodes and change them to use one of the new IDs. I think that would overwrite the existing entries (if any) and prevent further proliferation, as long as you continued to use a small set of IDs.

Of course, I may be off on my memory of how that code works…

Sorry about the inconvenience this has caused you,
Devon

Hi Theo,

Yes, you are correct – Post Notif is not going to be upgraded to address any plugin-related changes necessitated by WordPress 5.0.

As you probably saw, in my pinned note, I am 3/4 of the way through my couple of months away from WordPress, so I have no definitive statement right now about whether the future contains a Post Notif “v2”.

I am sorry that this likely means you’ll need to find another post notification plugin, particularly since it has been working well for you, according to your complimentary comments and patience about/with Post Notif, despite its shortcomings.

Sorry for the hassle,
Devon

Hi Heather,

The mechanism for manually adding a subscriber is via the Import Subscribers functionality, from the admin Dashboard (Post Notif >> Import Subscribers). For full details on the process, check out the FAQ (https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/post-notif/#faq) and look at the five consecutive import topics, starting with “Where do I import subscribers?”.

Hope this helps,
Devon

Hi Ruediger,

I appreciate your understanding and willingness to test even though you’ve moved on from Post Notif. You have zero reason to apologize for switching to another plugin that better suits your needs! I am glad to hear you have found something that works for your situation – that’s the beauty of WordPress (and open source software overall) – freedom of choice and a lot of alternatives to choose from.

Take care,
Devon

Hi rh0,

Thanks for the heads-up regarding the Gutenberg (in)compatibility. I have chosen to focus on Post Notif’s successor, built from the start to work with Gutenberg, so the existing plugin has admittedly been neglected (not to mention version 1.1.5 which, by definition, is frozen in amber, being a past version as it is ?? ).

I’ll admit I’m somewhat conflicted as to how best to proceed, since I do not presently have the bandwidth to simultaneously work on Post Notif itself AND its replacement. In all likelihood, the existing Post Notif will remain non-compatible with Gutenberg. I know this is not what you (and probably many others) want to hear and for that I apologize. I hope you are able to get what you need from it, as it “works” now, or, if not, are able to find another one of the solid post notification plugin options out there to better suit your needs.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Hans,

You have revealed the annoying inconsistency in my naming of the @@ variables. ??

The reason your use case works with @@permalinkurl is because it resolves to only the literal URL text, NOT the full anchor tag (as @@permalink does). This clearly shows my need to be both more consistent with my variable naming and more clear in the documentation of how these can(/should?) be used. I will be addressing this in Post Notif’s successor!

Thanks,
Devon

Ruediger,

That is certainly a viable workaround! ??

westweib,

Appreciate the offer; I’ll add you to the list!

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Ruediger and Barbara,

Thanks for being so understanding. I am going to proceed with getting Post Notif v1.1.5 released as its own plugin (name TBD ?? ), to tide you and others over (and get rid of what, I fully agree[!], is an annoying, persistent “this plugin has an update available” message) at least until I have the successor to the current Post Notif plugin in a stable (even if development) state. Then you can decide for yourselves if you want to switch to the new one or are content with the features and behavior of the “new” Post Notif v1.1.5 for the long-term.

Again, I appreciate your willingness to help test!

More to come soon…

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Hans,

The code that handles the @@unsubscribeurl variable is contained on a single line (line 689) of post-notif/admin/class-post-notif-admin.php and merely replaces the variable with the current subscriber’s individualized URL (containing email address and authcode), using the literal URL as BOTH the anchor tag’s href attribute value AND the anchor’s (visible) text. I think this is what is tripping you up, as it looks, from your last note, like you are attempting to provide your own anchor text following the literal @@unsubscribeurl. As I recall, the rationale for why I implemented this to behave this way may have had to do with issues, during testing, where some email clients didn’t render the hyperlinks as such and therefore made them impossible to click or copy-and-paste. Since providing one-click unsubscribe is a big deal, for simplicity’s sake, I chose the approach I you see today.

However, I can see that it might be nice to offer admins the ability to configure the anchor text separately, so I have added it to my list of future potential enhancements.

Hope this helps,
Devon