Kentico CMS has many different ways to handle content notifications in the form of email alerts. You can use the built in notification gateways, various subscription web parts, and/or dynamic newsletters. All of these components offer great solutions to the various scenarios where you want to keep your users up to date on what is going on with the content on your website. Notice the key word I used in that last sentence, users. I am re-enforcing that point because all of the above mentioned components require that a subscriber be a full user account, password and all, in your Kentico website.
Having a user who has a full account on the website works perfectly when it comes to an intranet or membership based web site, but doesn’t always work for someone who is just running a blog or basic company website. Sometimes the whole goal of a personal blog or brochure site is to actually capture an anonymous visitor’s email address without that visitor having to go through the hassle of creating a full fledged account. The less steps the better is usually the rule of thumb. So having a visitor perform a full registration may not be a good thing and could been seen as a barrier to entry.
In this two part mini blog post series I am going to show you how to leverage a few tools that Kentico CMS gives you, out of the box, to create a system to alert anonymous subscribers when a new blog post is created. The solution involves using the built in Newsletter module, Advanced Workflow, and a custom Workflow Action to tie it all together. One other small note, Kentico CMS Ultimate or Kentico EMS are required for all of this to work.