A powerful plugin that is easy to use and simply works

One of the many WordPress sites that I manage has several users poking around publishing and editing posts and custom post types. Because the site is quite large and gets a considerable amount of traffic, we have a staging environment where we make our daily changes and “push” the whole site (using WP Engine’s push system) when we want our changes to go live. Before, any time a change was made we would have to communicate via word of mouth so we could schedule a push. Now, whenever a post or custom post type is edited or published on staging I will get a notification letting me know. This allows our process to be much more streamlined and for our development team to be more responsive.

I have noticed that sometimes certain messages get flagged as spam for some people, so it is important to make sure your Subject and From fields are not so spammy. Also, sometimes when multiple posts are changed in a small period of time a lot of notifications will get sent out. The WordPress admin is obviously responsible for this, but it would be nice to have a setting where messages are a little bit delayed and aggregate together instead of being sent out individually. This isn’t a must-have, but it would be a nice add-on.

Simply put, this plugin has been an absolute godsend for us. I am very selective of the plugins that I install on my sites; If a plugin does not completely satisfy my needs I will usually just create a local plugin myself – But Better Notifications is extremely easy to use and I am very impressed with its flexibility and power.