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Announce new Newsletter issues to social media in one go
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Description

Imagine a World where announcing a new issue of a newsletter would not only send a notification to all subscribers, but also update the Twitter, Facebook or Google+ pages related to that newsletter.

How would this work?

In terms of UI, Manage newsletters would include fields for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ URLs (or whatever their respective APIs take). Probably the same message sent to Echo could be recycled for social media.

In terms of backend... if this "social media integration" is difficult to implement in the extension and/or have them deployed in Wikimedia servers, then maybe an option would be to have a tool in Labs that would somehow be subscribed to newsletters, would have access to the Newsletters details, and forward messages where appropriate?

Event Timeline

Qgil triaged this task as Low priority.Apr 3 2016, 8:23 AM
Qgil moved this task from Backlog to Confirmed on the MediaWiki-extensions-Newsletter board.

I was thinking about it for a while, and here are my impressions:

Rather than creating (and managing) our own application to do this, we can actually make use of Wikipedia support for https://ifttt.com/services/wikipedia/. People who want to notify newsletter announce action can actually create a custom script (which we will document of course) to publish there things to social media points (LinkedIn, Facebook pages, etc). Here is what should happen:

From mediawiki end:

  1. We have to ask a user for their IFTTT API key somehow. This can even go as a setting to Special:Preferences.

From their end:

  1. They have to create an account on IFTTT.com.
  2. Use our recipe (which will almost look similar to https://ifttt.com/applets/87880092d-if-maker-event-newsletter_new_issue-then-create-a-status-message-on-thinkfoss)
  3. Connect their social media platforms with IFTTT.com
  4. Save their API key at Special:Preferences on mediawiki

Profit. @Qgil if you think it looks good, we can even make this a Google-Code-in-2018 task.