Hello everyone,

We'd like to give you a quick update on Echo and let you know about today's deployment on MediaWiki.org.

The project is coming along nicely, and we keep adding new features every week. Here are some highlights.


1. Today's deployment
Benny and Kaldari just deployed a couple new features on MediaWiki.org today:

• Dismiss (turn off notification types from the flyout or all-notifications page)
• Web Preferences (control which notification types to include on your flyout or all-notifications page)

These features are not in their final form yet, but already provide a lot more control over which notifications you receive on the web or via email. Stay tuned for more …

If you experience any issues, please file a bug here on Bugzilla, or post a note on this talk page. 

For detailed instructions on how to test the current version of Echo, check out this updated testing page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Testing


2. Next features
Our next Echo deployment is now scheduled for the week of March 4th. 

The team is now working on these features for that deployment:
•  Bundling
• JobQueue
• Metrics
• HTML Email

Learn more on our feature requirements page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Metrics


3. Next notifications
We aim to develop these notifications for our first release:
• User Mention 
• Welcome (in collaboration with E3)
• How to use your watchlist (in collaboration with E3)
• Thank you (positive notification)
• User rights (power user request)

Here's a short list of notifications planned for our first release:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#First_Notifications


4. Project Goals
We are on track for a first limited deployment on the English Wikipedia in late March/early April, if all goes according to plan. 

Here are our goals for this quarter (January-March 2013):
• focus on new users (but make it usable by experienced editors)
• complete core features (flyout, "archive", prefs, job queue, bundling, metrics, HTML email)
• add a few more notifications ("happy path" for new users, useful notices for power users)
• deploy limited release on en-wiki (different defaults for new and experienced users)
• fix bugs + critical feature tweaks (as needed, prioritized by urgency)
• provide in-house developer support (through hooks, i18n and dev guidelines)
• estimate maintenance + i18n support (for 2013-2014 plan)

Find out more in this short-term timeline and longer-term roadmap, as well as these project slides.

Enjoy!


Fabrice and the Echo team

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation


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