What is the best practice for creating a new type of email notification that uses the
business logic in the EmailNotification class? (That is, obeying user preferences,
watchlist settings, minor edits, etc.)
For example, suppose we want to generate an email notification whenever an article is
added to a category, for all users watching the category page. In MediaWiki 1.13, it was
possible to subclass EmailNotification and substitute a custom subject line and body for
the email, and then call notifyOnPageChange(), but MediaWiki 1.14 has changed the subject
& body members from public to private, making this impossible. The class contains no
hooks either.
One approach, taken by the existing Extension:CategoryWatcher, is to implement all your
own business logic, duplicating EmailNotification's current capabilities. We don't
like this solution, since it won't leverage any future changes in EmailNotification
(or will just break in the future).
If there's no good solution, I'll file an enhancement request. It should be easy
to leverage MediaWiki's notification system.
Any advice appreciated. Thanks.
DanB