The
CentralNotice
extension delivers announcements (usually in the form of banners) to Wikimedia wikis.
It is used heavily by the
Fundraising
team to solicit donations, and for announcements of interest to Wikimedia communities and users.
CentralNotice can target announcements by country, language, project, device and logged-in status.
This page has information for CentralNotice developers
and
wiki administrators
who want to install CentralNotice on their own sites.
To learn how to create and configure CentralNotice campaigns, please see
Help:CentralNotice
on
Meta-Wiki
.
For information about the CentralNotice setup on the Wikimedia Foundation's cluster, see
CentralNotice
on
Wikitech
.
CentralNotice allows central distribution of announcements to many wikis (called
subscribing
wikis) from a central wiki (the
infrastructure
wiki).
If you only need to post messages to a single wiki
, consider using
Sitenotice
instead.
Installation
CentralNotice is developed, tested, and known to be deployed only on wikis that do not use table prefixing. If your setup uses table prefixing there is no guarantee this extension will work. Please report any bugs to
Phabricator
.
For all wikis
- Download the latest snapshot
and extract it to your extensions directory.
- Add to
LocalSettings.php
the following:
wfLoadExtension
(
'CentralNotice'
);
- By default, GeoIP lookup is disabled. If the
Geo
cookie is pre-populated, however, its value will be used. For local development, you can enable a client-side implementation that uses
https://freegeoip.net
as follows. For more information, see
#GeoIP lookup
.
$wgCentralNoticeGeoIPBackgroundLookupModule
=
'ext.centralNotice.freegeoipLookup'
;
The infrastructure wiki
- From the command line, go to the wiki root and run
php maintenance/update.php
- Edit
LocalSettings.php
and set ...
$wgNoticeInfrastructure
to true
$wgNoticeProjects
to be an array of projects that will subscribe to the central wiki. For example
array( 'wikipedia', 'wiktionary' )
- By default the
sysop
group is the only group with the ability to administer CentralNotice. If additional groups are needed, assign them the
centralnotice-admin
and
edit-interface
permissions.
Subscribing wikis
Edit
LocalSettings.php
and set...
$wgNoticeInfrastructure
to
false
;
$wgNoticeProject
to be an entry in
$wgNoticeProjects
;
$wgCentralHost
to the protocol (potentially neutral) and domain of the central wiki. For example
//meta.wikimedia.org
;
$wgCentralSelectedBannerDispatcher
to the URL of Special:BannerLoader on the central wiki, for example:
//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php/Special:BannerLoader
;
- either
$wgCentralDBname
to the name of the infrastructure wiki's database, or
$wgCentralNoticeApiUrl
to the API endpoint of the infrastructure wiki; and
$wgCentralBannerRecorder
to the URL of Special:RecordImpression on the central wiki. For example:
//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php/Special:RecordImpression
.
Quick developer setup
For most development tasks, you can use a single wiki in both infrastructure and subscribing roles.
Following are sample lines to include in
LocalSetting.php
.
(See notes in comments.)
wfLoadExtension
(
'CentralNotice'
);
$wgNoticeInfrastructure
=
true
;
$wgNoticeProjects
=
array
(
'centralnoticeproject'
);
# 'centralnoticeproject' can be any string
$wgNoticeProject
=
'centralnoticeproject'
;
# must be the same as above
$wgCentralHost
=
'localhost'
;
$wgCentralSelectedBannerDispatcher
=
'http://localhost/mw/index.php?title=Special:BannerLoader'
;
$wgCentralDBname
=
'databasename'
;
# the same as $wgDBname
$wgCentralNoticeGeoIPBackgroundLookupModule
=
'ext.centralNotice.freegeoipLookup'
;
All code that runs on subscribing wikis should be smoke-tested with
MobileFrontend
, to ensure they work on the mobile version of the site.
Dependencies
Some CentralNotice features require other MediaWiki extensions, including
EventLogging
and
Translate
.
Getting help
Permissions
centralnotice-admin
? Permission required to modify campaigns and banners. Relevant only to the infrastructure wikis (see also
bugzilla:26377
).
edit-interface
is required to edit banner content.
Design concepts
From a user facing perspective, the high level CentralNotice objects are
campaigns
(a.k.a. notices) and
banners
(a.k.a. templates).
These are affected by the back end concepts of
selectors
and
allocation
.
- Banner
? a single block of translatable html/wikitext/css/javascript that will display at the top of
Manual:$wgContentNamespaces
pages. The user status, device type, UI language
selectors
are applied to banners.
- Banners may be grouped by
category
. All banners in a category share user side cookies, such as the hiding cookie that is set when a user clicks a banner close button.
- Campaign
? a collection of banners. The project, country and content language selectors apply at the campaign level. The system allows as many active campaigns at the same time as you want dynamically calculating an
allocation
for each banner in an active campaign. Campaigns are defined as active if the central wiki time is greater than the campaign start time, less than the campaign end time, and the campaign is marked as enabled.
- Banners in a campaign are assigned a
bucket
and
weight
. Buckets are yet another selector, and weight affects the relative allocation of banners inside a campaign.
- There are four
priority
levels in CentralNotice. Higher priority campaigns will get a greater allocation of page views.
- Campaigns may be
locked
which will prevent editing and deletion of the campaign; but not the banners inside a campaign.
- Selector
? any property which may be filtered on for the purposes of allocation. This allows, for example, different banners to be shown to logged in versus logged out users in Argentina browsing Wikipedia in English.
- A
selection vector
is the complete set of selectors a user presents to the central wiki when requesting a banner.
- Allocation
? The chance a banner will be shown to a user under a given selection vector.
Design documents
GeoIP lookup
By default, CentralNotice has no client-side GeoIP lookup service configured.
This is optimised for the Wikimedia Foundation production configuration where Varnish populates the
Geo
cookie from the server-side.
(See
wikitech:Geolocation
.)
You can configure CentralNotice to use a custom data source client-side through the
CentralNoticeGeoIPBackgroundLookupModule
configuration variable.
This variable expects the name of a ResourceLoader module that exports a function.
The function will be called without parameters and should return a Promise that resolves with an object containing the following properties:
- country: string - Two-letter country code.
- region: string - Implementation specific.
- city: string - City name.
- lat: number.
- lon: number.
Usage
Full usage instructions can be found at
meta:Help:CentralNotice
.
New Banner
- Load
Special:CentralNoticeBanners
- Click on the add banner link at the bottom of the page (must be logged in as an admin).
- Enter in a name and the raw HTML for the given banner.
- If this banner is going to be translated then enclose any text to be translated with triple parens - {{{FOO}}}.
- Submit
(TODO: move and expand this snippet)
- Each banner has its banner definition stored in MediaWiki:Centralnotice-template-<name>
- All of its messages are stored below the banner defined in MediaWiki:Centralnotice-template-<name>-<message>/<language_code>
New Campaign
- Load
Special:CentralNotice
- Add a campaign with a given start time at the bottom portion of the page, leave a comment, and click submit.
- If this campaign is only run on a specific wiki and or language then select it from the pull downs.
- Click on the new campaign and add the banners you want within this running campaign and their respective weights.
- If all looks well then set this campaign to enabled and it will show at the corresponding time.
Overriding selection
Add any of the following URL parameters to preview a specific banner, defeat "diet" schemes, or debug pseudorandom banner selection.
- banner
- You can test a banner directly on any wiki by adding
?banner=
<bannername>
to the end of the URL.
- randomcampaign
- A decimal number between 0 and 1, to be used as the "random" seed for choosing a campaign.
- randombanner
- A decimal number between 0 and 1, to be used as the "random" seed for choosing a banner among banners available in the chosen campaign.
- country
- Override the country code, before filtering to geotargeted campaigns. Accepts two-character
ISO 3166-1
codes.
- uselang
- Its usual meaning in MediaWiki, this determines which banners you may be shown. Beware of content language vs. user language.
- force
- Override any banner hiding code, show the banner.
- reset
- Zero out any cookies being used to customize banner display (e.g. delivered impression count).
For example,
Debugging problematic banners
If there is a problematic banner in the page, you can identify which banner is active by opening your developer console and inspecting the value of
mw.centralNotice.bannerData.bannerName
.
Limitations
Banners
do not display
on pages in the
Special
namespace, as well as edit pages and diff pages.
API
CentralNotice adds two API modules,
centralnoticechoicedata
and
centralnoticequerycampaign
.
(The API module
centralnoticeallocations
was deprecated and removed in MediaWiki 1.25.)
(
main
|
centralnoticechoicedata
)
- This module requires read rights.
- Source:
CentralNotice
- License:
GPL-2.0-or-later
Get data needed to choose a banner for a given project and language
Specific parameters:
- project
The project to get banner choice data for.
- This parameter is required.
- language
The language to get banner choice data for.
- This parameter is required.
(
main
|
centralnoticequerycampaign
)
- This module requires read rights.
- Source:
CentralNotice
- License:
GPL-2.0-or-later
Get all configuration settings for a campaign.
Specific parameter:
- campaign
Campaign name. Separate multiple values with a "|" (vertical bar).
- Default:
(empty)
See also
This extension is being used on one or more
Wikimedia projects
. This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used by such high-traffic websites. Look for this extension's name in Wikimedia's
CommonSettings.php
and
InitialiseSettings.php
configuration files to see where it's installed. A full list of the extensions installed on a particular wiki can be seen on the wiki's
Special:Version
page.
|
This extension is included in the following wiki farms/hosts and/or packages:
This is not an authoritative list.
Some wiki farms/hosts and/or packages may contain this extension even if they are not listed here.
Always check with your wiki farms/hosts or bundle to confirm.
|