[Mediawiki-l] Extension for Announcements?

[Dan Davis]

I need to know if the following idea is (1) doable, (2) already done by
someone, and (3) [if not 2] how to approach the problem.

We would like to have announcements placed on our wiki. The best place to
put them would be the Main Page... assuming that everyone used the Main
Page, that is. The problem is that many folks use a search plug-in or
bookmarks to get to where they need. The next best place would be a login
page but our authentication is handled externally and you'll never see a
login page on our wiki.

So, what I would like to explore is some way to forcefully redirect a user
to an announcement. For example, User A is browsing the wiki. User B adds an
announcement. User A clicks a new link (or does a new Search, etc). We'd
like to see User A redirected to the announcement. The announcement page
would show the oldest announcement with a 'acknowledge' link/button. If
there were more then one announcement, they'd get directed to the next, etc.
Until finally being redirected to the original page they were requesting.

At this point, I'm not fixed on any particular method of storing the
announcements, but something simple like having
"/wiki/Announcements/<Announcement Title>" contain the announcement text.
Then have the extension store the page ID as 'LastAckedAnnouncement' in
user.user_options.

We are running mediawiki-1.7.1. I know we're a bit behind, but we have so
many little tweaks to the core code that upgrading is a major project.

Thoughts?

Dan