Hi everyone,
I am Abhinand N and I have been selected for GSoC'16 for the project - Extension for page creation/editing notification. I would like to share my experience in contributing to MediaWiki and my perspective on implementing the extension in MediaWiki.
*About me*
I am a first year Computer Science major from Amrita University, India. I am coming from a small town called Palakkad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palakkad_district in Kerala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala. Kerala is known as Gods own Country and it is a very beautiful place. I got introduced to MediaWiki through FOSS community in my campus - FOSS@Amrita http://foss.amrita.ac.in/. Its one of the active club in the campus where we are introduced to a new world of open source technology apart from the usual academic work. I started contributing to MediaWiki by fixing small bugs. I noticed this project when it was put up as featured for GSoC. I went through the project description the project and got very much excited to work on the same. Yaron Koren is my mentor for this project. He is one of the coolest guy whom I have ever met and I am very happy to work with him.
*Project*
This project aims to create notification when a page is created or edited by any user. There are already existing modules like Watchlist, Semantic Watchlist, PageCreationNotif etc that helps with notification. However, the extension that I am going to develop allows the user to configure the notification system the way he/she needs. The configuration is not limited to whether the user needs to receive the notification via Email, Echo notification or as the recent changes in a special page. Also, the user is given the option to track all pages, pages in specific namespace or category, or a specified list of pages.
Just as the pages to be tracked are grouped, the people who are to be notified are also grouped as
- User in a user group, - A user in a user-list, - User who signed up to be notified or - to Email addresses of non MediaWiki users.
That's a brief explanation about the project. Currently I haven't yet decided on how the extension should be structured and on the user interface part of the extension, which is one of the most important things to be considered. Also the priority of the events are not concluded. I would be grateful to get your valuable suggestions and feedback about the project. It would help me a lot to make the extension more effective and convenient for the user.
Kind regards