Do you have a large subscriber base? As you probably know, until recently, trying to manage that list of subscribers has not been an easy task. Way back in the early days of MT-Notifier you had to do all your subscriber management through a series of drop-down menus. Then a rudimentary admin interface was created by Blumunky, and finally back in version 3.5.0, I added an actual, honest-to-goodness interface to the plugin itself. But as you have likely discovered, paging through a number of entries (thousands, hundreds, or even dozens) to find one of those subscribers is still a bit unpleasant, and it's just not ideal.

With recent versions of Movable Type, it became possible for plugins to register their own object types (like subscriptions). Those objects could even be searched based on registering a search API. But until recently, I had been unable to crack that code (sometimes the code is, shall we say, less than well-documented). So if you had tried to use the Search Subscriptions box in the upper-right corner to actually help speed the process of finding a subscription in your monstrous list of subscribers, you would be met with an ugly error message. No more.

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I have a thought on how to fix the category issue with MT-Notifier (where you have to save it in unpublished mode with categories, then publish it before saving in published mode).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.