Extension:Notificator

What can this extension do?
It provides a convenient way for users to send a notification e-mail about a page change or a new page at arbitrary points in time.

The use case for which the extension was written, is the following: A company internal Wiki where task pages are work assignments, and where the project manager needs a way to notify (with the click of a button) the assigned resource about changes to the work assignments. The standard MediaWiki notification system does not work for multiple reasons:
 * 1) the assigned resource may not have all task pages on his/her watchlist
 * 2) the project manager may want to make multiple edits, and would only want to notify after all edits are done, not for each individual edit
 * 3) the project manager would want to notify one person after one edit, and another person after another edit - not everyone on every edit

There are probably other use cases where this functionality could be useful as well.

Usage
The extension can be used in two ways:
 * 1) with a pre-set e-mail address to be notified:
 * 2) without a pre-set e-mail address, in which case any e-mail address can be entered right on the page:

In most cases, one of these parser function invocations will be in a template that gets transcluded into a class of pages.

Details
When the "notify" button gets clicked, the following happens:
 * Notificator checks if that e-mail address has already received a notification about the page the button is on
 * If it has, Notificator checks whether the notification was for the current revision
 * If it was for the current revision, it does not send another notification.
 * If it was not for the current revision, it sends a mail containing a link to the page, and the differences between the current and the last notified revision
 * If Notificator has never before sent a notification about this page, yet, it sends a mail containing just a link to the page

The person clicking the button sees the e-mail that gets send, or a message that no notification was sent.

Download instructions
Please download the extension from and unpack it under. Note: $IP stands for the root directory of your MediaWiki installation, the same directory that holds LocalSettings.php.

Alternatively, you can get it directly via SVN from the MediaWiki source code repository, at http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Notificator/. From a command line, you can call the following:

svn checkout http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Notificator/

Installation
To install this extension, add the following to LocalSettings.php:

Now please run the update.php script, which will create the necessary 'notificator' table in your Wiki's database.

$ngFromAddress
The e-mail address the notification e-mails appear to be coming from. If this is not set, $wgPasswordSender will be used instead.