As some of you may know, Mailman had a bunch of Google Summer of Code students working on our codebase via Systers, which hired students to do improvements on their Mailman-based list infrastructure.
I was mentoring for the project which worked on the archives, where we had two students, Yian Shang who worked on the web interface for the archives, and Priya Iyer who worked on integrating search. They've produced some great demos that you all need to see, and some code that I'd really like to see integrated into Mailman 3.
I was going to forward their final summaries to the lists, but since they're quite long, here's the things I'd like you all to check out first and foremost. There's two neat demos here!
#1:
Yian's been working on a variety of UI infrastructure improvements (note that in this case, she's working at the code to support the UI, not the graphics and theming, so this may not *look* fancy but it *behaves* really well)
Her threaded conversation demo is here: http://dev.systers.org/pipermail/testing/all/conversation-3.html
and note that you can actually click through and read messages there, so try poking around those archives and see how you like them!
And you might be interested in hearing about the use cases that went into threading and quote detection that made that demo possible. Many of you may have answered the surveys I sent out on her behalf which were used to generate these use cases! She's got a whole series of posts on it, but here's one of interest: http://movicont.nfshost.com/blog/mailman-archives-ui-added-automatically-det...
#2:
Priya's search demo is here: http://lists.priyakuber.in/cgi-bin/mailman/mailocate/search.py
She'd originally hoped to find and integrate an existing search package, but licensing proved to be an issue for upstream contribution, so she wound up implementing her own. You can search a string, a phrase, wildcard searches with *, by author, by subject, and using some basic operators (AND OR NOT all work). It's got a basic spell check, though she expects that will need to be improved.
The documentation is here: http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/doumentation-priya And the code is here: http://github.com/beachbrake/Mailocate/tree/master/demo/
I've cc'ed mailman-users on this email since many people there contributed to the surveys we used to develop use-cases, but follow-ups should probably go to mailman-developers!
Terri