Help:Extension:Newsletter

The Newsletter extension is a tool to facilitate subscription and delivery of newsletters hosted on MediaWiki-based sites. It allows publishers of on-wiki newsletters to announce new issues to their subscribers, and allows users to browse and subscribe to newsletters that are registered with the extension. The Newsletter extension uses the Notifications (previously known as Echo) tool to notify subscribers of a Newsletter when a new issue is announced.

This extension was initially developed as a Google Summer of Code 2015 project. As of January 2016, the Newsletter extension is not deployed on Wikimedia. You can see progress here. In the meantime, a test instance of the extension can be found here.

Viewing a newsletter
In order to view a list of newsletters, navigate to Special:Newsletters (example from test site). There, you will see a table of newsletters you can filter through.

You can navigate to each newsletter of your choice by clicking its link.

Subscribing/Unsubscribing
In order to subscribe or unsubscribe to a newsletter, you must first log in. You can then do either one of two things:
 * Navigate to Special:Newsletters [example on text site) and click the subscribe/unsubscribe link on the right side of the table.
 * Navigate to the page of the desired newsletter and click the subscribe button.

Notification preferences
When a new issue is announced, you will receive notifications via the Notifications tool. You can receive notifications via web or e-mail. To configure this, navigate to the tab of your preferences (example on test site) and enable or disable notification methods as desired.

Registering a newsletter
First, navigate to Special:CreateNewsletter ([example on test site)

Then, fill in the following fields: Once the newsletter has been created, you will get a success message and a link to the new newsletter will be shown.
 * Title of the newsletter
 * A link to an existing wiki page that will serve as the newsletter's main page
 * A description of the newsletter

Publishing a new issue
In order to publish a new issue of a newsletter, do the following: Once a new issue has been announced, it will notify all subscribers via the Notifications tool.
 * 1) Navigate to the newsletter's main page.
 * 2) Click the 'Announce' button in the menu at the top.
 * 3) Fill in the required fields.
 * 4) * Page title of the issue
 * 5) * Summary of the issue

Managing a newsletter
In order to manage a newsletter, navigate to the newsletter's main page and click the 'Manage' button in the menu at the top. Here are the actions you can take from there:
 * Change the title of the newsletter
 * Change the description of the newsletter
 * Add and remove publishers by modifying the list in the text box, with each publisher separated by a newline

Adding and removing subscribers
In order to add and remove subscribers, first navigate to the newsletter's main page and click the 'View Subscribers' button in the menu at the top. This will bring you to a new page with a text box containing the existing subscribers. Add or remove subscribers from the list, ensuring that each subscriber is on his or her own line.

Deleting a newsletter
Instead of having a separate interface for deleting a newsletter, this can be done simply by using the wiki's regular deletion interface, which can be accessed by clicking the 'More' tab at the top and selecting 'Delete' from the dropdown.

User rights
In order to perform various actions on a newsletter, you must have certain rights, which are assigned to administrators on most wikis. See Extension:Newsletter for more information on user rights in the Newsletter extension.
 * - Allows you to create a newsletter
 * - Allows you to delete a newsletter
 * - Allows you to perform almost every other action, such as publishing a new newsletter issue, adding/removing subscribers, and more. See the sections below for more specific details on actions you can take.