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Hi,

for one of the Wikis I'm working on, we needed a way for persons to notify other persons about changes to pages, or new pages.

The built-in MediaWiki notification system did not work, for a couple of reasons: - - It cannot notify someone who doesn't already know about a page (and put it on his/her watchlist already) - - It notifies everyone watching the page on every edit (or not, if the notified person did not visit the page since the last notification) - so in short, the notification time and persons to be notified cannot be chosen arbitrarily by the page changer

So I developed the Notificator extension [1], which solves the above problems, and provides us with the needed flexibility: "Notify <e-mail address>" buttons can be placed on arbitrary pages, or via templates on a whole class of pages, and anyone with access to the Wiki can click them and trigger a notification to a pre-set e-mail address, or to an e-mail address entered right on the page. The main idea behind the extension is, that a user decides when to send a notification, and not the system. It brings a "Tell <someone> about this page/change!" button to MediaWiki.

Feel free to test it, there is a demo installation at [2].

Btw., I'm waiting for MediaWiki SVN commit access - once I get that, I'll commit the extension to the MediaWiki extension source tree, so that it can be translated to other languages and others can help improve it. Note that this is my first "real" extension, so it would be great if someone with experience could have a look at the code and send patches or suggestions where I did things that could have been done better.

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Notificator [2] http://patrick-nagel.net/wiki/Notificator_demo

Cheers, Patrick.

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