Snitch is an extension that overrides ExpressionEngine’s built-in notification system. It sends notifications when entries are created, updated, and deleted, and enables you to customize the e-mail template. It uses the same per-weblog Notification Preferences that the built-in notification system use, so setup is quick and painless.

For more information and the download, go to http://brandon-kelly.com/apps/snitch/

This one’s a bit more complex than Sarge, so if you’re using it, please let me know how it works for you! (I’ve been using it in a production environment for a few weeks now without a problem, but that’s just one server configuration.)

You are just coming out with them now aren’t you Brandon!!!

Will give this one a try. Sounds really good. Thanks for sharing this with the community, I’m sure it will be very handy for a lot of people.

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark Bowen - 06 April 2008 03:26 PM

You are just coming out with them now aren’t you Brandon!!!

Just wait for the next one

Brandon Kelly - 06 April 2008 03:29 PM

Just wait for the next one

Ah now you’ve got me wondering what you have hiding up your sleeve. I want to see it now!!

Best wishes,

Mark

Cool, I imagine this will be useful for those sites that need to establish some sort of workflow, passing a post from one group to another until it gets published. Or something like that. Thanks.

Exactly. We’re using it to monitor all activity on a staging site for Navigant (there are several people that will have access to the CMS). Before syncing the staging server with the production servers, we’ll use the notifications to review all the changes that have been made.

Brandon Kelly - 06 April 2008 08:12 PM

Before syncing the staging server with the production servers, we’ll use the notifications to review all the changes that have been made.

Are you finding it enormously difficult to work with a staging/live server setup, as far as syncing databases? I have a large client who is doing this (dev, testing, production) and up to now, anything I do on dev needs to be more or less manually replicated on production. This is probably fodder for another thread, but I’m always curious to see how people are managing to sync multiple boxes.

mdesign - 06 April 2008 08:51 PM

Are you finding it enormously difficult to work with a staging/live server setup, as far as syncing databases?

Not so much… we’ve got one shell script that dupes the DB (except for a couple tables), doing a URL search & replace in the process, and another one that runs rsync on several of the directories. It’s worked great so far.

It’s not really syncing, though, is it? Meanind there’s no content on the live server that doesn’t exist on the staging server, and couldn’t be overwritten (think comments, user articles etc.)?

It would certainly be a different matter if the content went in both directions. “Cloning” might be a better term.

Thanks, just wanting to make sure I understood you correctly.

Brandon, this is a terrific extension and it gives me a lot of ideas. Instead of organizing content by categories, it’s probably better to do so by weblog—so that Snitch can dispatch updates. May I ask, is it Multiple Site Manager aware?

Brendon Carr - 07 April 2008 07:28 AM

May I ask, is it Multiple Site Manager aware?

Not yet, but my guess is that it will work just fine.