[Mailman-Developers] Web UI

[Terri Oda]

A few days ago, a discussion of Mailman's web UI started on mailman- 
users: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ 
msg49681.html

Since this is more of a development effort than a users issue, we're  
moving continued discussion here.

I'll kick off the thread by answering a question:

> But how easy is it to actually improve the web UI?

Not very.  Not only is it tightly integrated, but any text change  
will have to go through all the many translators for various  
languages.  And then there's accessibility concerns, issues regarding  
any extra install requirements we might want to add (eg for  
templating systems), and the basic problem of building an interface  
that appeals to a rather large array of people... Changing the web UI  
is a big pain.

That said, I think this is a worthwhile endeavour, and we had  
previous discussed an improved web UI being a good goal for a 2.2  
release (we'll also need new UI for mm3, of course).  Just don't  
expect it to happen tomorrow or be a cakewalk.  This is not a project  
to take on lightly.


I've started up a wiki page here for us to capture ideas for an  
improved web UI:

http://wiki.list.org/x/RoBE


and being the self-interested person that I am, I'm going to try to  
generate some thoughts on my own idea here first ;)

I think we could benefit a fair bit from having a "simple" and an  
"expert" interface for the list administrators.  I had a number of  
replies both on and off list saying "yes!  please!" so I take it I'm  
not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.  My question to  
everyone is... what options would you deem essential in the "simple"  
interface?

  Terri