Extension:EmailPage

MediaWiki extensions manual

EmailPage Release status: stable
Implementation	Special page , Notify
Description	Allows to send rendered HTML pages to an email address or list of addresses using PHPMailer (6.1)
Author(s)	Aran Dunkley, Igor Absorto
Latest version	2.5.1 (2021-02-13)
MediaWiki	1.25+
Database changes	No
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	GitLab: project page git repository URL [help ] commit history Note: No localisation updates are provided by translatewiki.net .
Parameters $wgEmailPageGroup $wgEmailPageCss $wgEmailPageAllowRemoteAddr $wgEmailPageAllowAllUsers $wgEmailPageToolboxLink $wgEmailPageActionLink $wgEmailPageSepPattern $wgEmailPageNoLinks
Hooks used SkinTemplateToolboxEnd SkinTemplateTabs SkinTemplateNavigation

The EmailPage extension allows to send rendered HTML page to an email address or list of addresses using PHPMailer (6.1).

Installation

• Download and place the file(s) in a directory called EmailPage in your extensions/ folder.
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php :

  wfLoadExtension( 'EmailPage' );
  

• Run composer install in the extension directory to download PHPMailer
• For versions <1.34 use the legacy branch. The master branch is tailored and it has been tested with version 1.34.
• Configure as required.
•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Usage

The extension adds a special page called Special:EmailPage which requires a parameter of the page title you wish to send. It also adds links to the actions and toolbox using the link names specified in $wgEmailPageToolboxLink and $wgEmailPageActionLink. Either one can be set to "" (empty) to remove the link.

The special page form has two main sections, one for selecting the recipients of the emailed page, the other to specify the specifics of the subject line, prepended message and CSS stylesheet.

In case you would like to create a special user group to utilize the functionality provided by this extension, use the right 'emailpage' to assign it (see also this discussion).

Selecting recipients

There are three different ways of specifying recipients for the page to be sent to, which are described below. All three can be used together in composing an overall selection of recipients.

From group

All the available MediaWiki groups are listed in a drop-down list. If one of these is selected then all the members of that group which have an email address will be added to the recipient list.

• Note that by default the "user" group which represents all registered users doesn't show, for it to show you must set $wgEmailPageAllowAllUsers to true.

Directly from a list

A textarea is supplied for adding additional recipients directly. These recipients can be entered directly as email addresses on each line, or separated by commas, semicolons or asterisks (bullet list). If an item is not an email address, it will be treated as a contact page title from which the first email address will be extracted. This textarea is treated as wikitext and will have templates expanded before extracting the email addresses which means that it can contain a DPL query which could result in a list of email addresses or contact pages.

Personalised emails

As of version 1.3.1, articles can contain named fields enclosed in braces which will be replaced with specific values for each recipient. The records it draws the data from are in the format used by other extensions such as Semantic Forms where each kind of record is a template for example Template:Member whos named triple-brace arguments define the fields of the record. To ensure that it's known to be treated as a record rather than any other template it should be categorised into Category:Records (using noinclude tags). Articles can then become records by transcluding a record template and giving it some specific parameters.

Example record

This example is for those who don't already have a system of maintaining records in wiki articles. First we'll define a new template article called Template:Person defining a name and an email address, and a simple layout table so that the record articles are easy to read (the layout in the template doesn't have anything to do with emailing though).

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Name:</th>
        <td>{{{name}}}</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <th>Email:</th>
        <td>{{{email}}}</td>
    </tr>
</table>
<noinclude>[[Category:Records]]</noinclude>

You can then create as many records as you like for example a new article called Maryjane may contain the following:

{{Person
 | name  = Maryjane
 | email = maryjane@smokyjoes.com
}}

Messages containing fields

Using our new records, we can send an article to the recipients with their proper name in the message, for example our article may contain the following wikitext content:

Dear {name|valued customer},
We'd like to remind you that some say our products can be up to
three times better quality than many other leading brands!

In the EmailPage form, select "Person" from the optional record drop-down box and send as normal. For each recipient, the extension will check if any record (article transcluding Template:Person) have the current email address in their parameters. If so, all the parameter values will be extracted from that article and used to replace the corresponding fields in the content being sent.

Default values can be supplied in case there is no record found, or the record doesn't contain some of the parameters. This is done using the pipe character as in the example above which replaces the name field with "valued customer" if the field can't be replaced. If there is no default, the brace enclosed name will be left unchanged in the content that gets sent.

Configuration

Here are some global variables which affect the operation of the extension. These should be set in your LocalSettings file after the include of the EmailPage.php script.

Variable	Default value	Meaning
$wgEmailPageGroup	'sysop'	Users must belong to this group to send emails (empty string means anyone can send)
$wgEmailPageCss	false	The name of a minimal CSS page to embed in the email (eg. monobook/main.css without portlets, actions etc).
$wgEmailPageAllowRemoteAddr	[ '127.0.0.1' ]	Trusted addresses (server-IP) for which anonymous sending is allowed. This allows local scripts and cron-jobs on the server to send email directly from an HTTP request.
$wgEmailPageAllowAllUsers	false	Whether to allow sending to all users (the "user" group)
$wgEmailPageToolboxLink	true	Add an email-page link to sidebar toolbox
$wgEmailPageActionLink	true	Add an email-page tab to the action links
$wgEmailPageSepPattern	"|[\r\n ,;*]+|"	Regular expression for splitting emails
$wgEmailPageNoLinks	false	Change links in message to spans if set
$wgEmailPageCharSet	'utf-8'	Define the character set of the message. PHPMailer supported charset must be used, either us-ascii, iso-8859-1 or utf-8.

Customization

CSS Stylesheets

By default the CSS used is called EmailPage.css which is intended to be a cut down compact css based on the stylesheet for you wiki but with all the portlet, actions and other skin related styles removed.

The EmailPage form also has a dropdown list containing all the other CSS pages found in the wiki (all pages with titles ending in .css).

(Q: Is EmailPage.css a wiki page? like MediaWiki:Common.css? .. or is it a file in the EmailPage directory?)

Issues with PHPMailer

Multibyte Character Set

For most languages it is necessary to switch to a Multibyte Character Set (MBCS), e.g. UTF-8.

This can be achieved by setting the global variable $wgEmailPageCharSet on your LocalSettings to the desired character set. PHPMailer supports us-ascii. iso-8859-1 and utf-8 which is the default option on the extension;

Todo & bugs

• Should log sends to an MW log

See also

• Extension:EmailToWiki - append, prepend or replace content in wiki pages by emailing title@wiki.domain
• Extension:FormMailer - Formats and sends posted forms to email recipients
• Extension:MassMessageEmail - Emails messages or pages to users
• Extension:CIForms - Forms with auto-validation, multiple choice questions and cloze tests, emailed as pdf