Extension:CategoryWatch

MediaWiki extensions manual

CategoryWatch Release status: stable
Implementation	Notify
Description	Extends watchlist functionality to include notification about membership changes of watched categories.
Author(s)	Aran Dunkley, Mark A. Hershberger
Latest version	2.0.0 (2018-08-02)
MediaWiki	1.27+
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (GitHub) commit history repository contributors (GitHub) code review
Parameters $wgCategoryWatchNotifyEditor $wgCategoryWatchUseAutoCat $wgCategoryWatchUseAutoCatRealName
Hooks used BeforeCreateEchoEvent CategoryAfterPageAdded CategoryAfterPageRemoved EchoGetBundleRules GetPreferences
Quarterly downloads	6 (Ranked 127th)
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The CategoryWatch extension extends watchlist functionality to include notification about membership changes of watched categories.

Echo support was recently added to this extension as well as support for modern extension loading.

Rationale

A feature that's missing from the MediaWiki Watchlist functionality is that if you watch a category page, you will only be notified when the content of the category page text changes. You won't be notified when pages are added to or removed from that category though which is probably the main information you were wanting when deciding to watch a category page.

This extension was developed primarily to be used in conjunction with the RecordAdmin extensions (which is obsolete), but it's also very useful by itself. When used with these extensions, it's used to allow roles to be notified when work items have changed state and been moved into a category they're responsible for.

Installation

• Download and move the extracted CategoryWatch folder to your extensions/ directory.
  Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/CategoryWatch
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'CategoryWatch' );
  

• Configure as required.
•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Configuration

• In Preferences → Watchlist, enable "Add all pages in a category to your watchlist when you add a category"
• $wgCategoryWatchNotifyEditor can be set to true which will allow the user who re-categorises an article to also receive the notification message if it is a category they are watching. This is useful so that the editor has an audit trail of all membership changes to categories they're watching.
• $wgCategoryWatchUseAutoCat can be set to true which causes users to automatically be watching a category of the name Category:Automatically watched by <USERNAME> (set it the categorywatch-autocat message). For example, if you were logged in to the wiki as User:Foo, then you would automatically be notified of any changes to articles in Category:Automatically watched by Foo.
• $wgCategoryWatchUseAutoCatRealName modifies the automatically watched category function to work with real names instead of usernames. If this was set to true for the example discussed in the previous paragraph, the category name might be something like Category:Automatically watched by Henry McFoo.

See also

• Manual:CategoryMembershipChanges - a MediaWiki feature that tracks category membership changes