Extension:Newsletter/Proposal

Newsletter Mediawiki Extension

 * Public Url: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Tinaj1234/Proposal
 * Phabricator report: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T76199
 * Announcement: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Newsletter_extension_for_MediaWiki

Name and contact information

 * Name:Tina Johnson
 * Email:tinajohnson.1234@gmail.com
 * Timezone: Kolkata, UTC+5:30
 * Typical working hours: 5pm to 2am (weekdays)
 * 9am to 9pm (weekends)


 * IRC Nick: tinajohnson on Freenode ( Channels: #mediawiki, #wikimedia-dev, #wikimedia-tech )
 * Other contact details: Talk Page: User: Tinaj1234

Project summary
Wikimedia projects and developers could use an extra hand when it comes to communicating the recent activities to the community as well as to the outside. The best possible solution we have at hand is a Newsletter, which brings together all the relevant news/updates at one place. This is where the idea of a newsletter extension comes in, allowing any number of wikis or projects to install the feature and deliver the latest updates to users(readers) through a 15 second subscription. The extension would have two genre of users:

Readers Publishers
 * A reader can subscribe to any number of newsletters easily through the Newsletter tab in Special:Preferences.
 * Newsletters the reader has subscribed to show up in Special:Newsletter. The idea is to portray all the subscribed newsletters as tiles hovering on which old issues of the corresponding newsletter pops out.
 * A user can choose how he/she should be notified of updates, possibly a message on User_talk page or just a notification - here we can make use of the functionality of Echo or Massmessage or otherwise an email. This choice can be at the time of subscribing.
 * Unsubscribing a newsletter would be just a click away.
 * After the extension is installed in a wiki, the publisher has many privileges including creating, editing, discarding a newsletter. There can be many contributors to a newsletter just the way a wiki page has many contributors.
 * Notifications are send out to subscribers when a newsletter is ready to be published.
 * Possible mentors
 * Quim Gil
 * Tony Thomas

Deliverables
What is expected:

Front end

Back end

* Microtasks

About you
I'm a 20 year old second year Computer Science Engineering undergraduate at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kollam. I'm a proud member of FOSS club in my college, which explains my interest in Open Source contributions. Also, this club is why and how I started contributing to Mediawiki. To get done with my first bug wasn't easy. Struggled to understand the code, even the instructions from IRC. But eventually when the patch was merged and when I got to see the trivial change that I made, it was pure joy. And that's what I love about contributing to Open Source. I get to make a difference, or even better voice my opinion on how something should be done.

When the project is finished, not just page input list will be improved but many more will be accomplished. As you go deeper into the idea being implemented, you can see how the extension itself is upgraded to a better version. Mediawiki is how I got started with bug fixing. The community has always been so kind with instant replies on IRC's and their keen interest in solving issues however trivial they may be. So when I thought of doing a GSoC project with Mediawiki, it just felt right.

Participation
Being part of the FOSS Club enables me to be connected with the Open Source Community around after my college hours. I try to blog regularly on new knowledge learnt. My blog will be the regular source of all progress during the coding phase. I actively respond to emails and am active at the wikimedia IRC channels, where I actively communicate with the community. All the source code written will be pushed to github repositories MassMessage. Test results will be put up on subpages of MassMessage or even a thread can be started so that developers can share their ideas and views.

Past open source experience

 * Bug fixes in Mediawiki.
 * Github profile:Tina Johnson
 * Gerrit Changes:Tinaj1234
 * Daily Wallet - Co-authored this webapp