Hello everyone.
I have been a long time supporter of Mailman 2 and now 3. Most of my experience with Mailman has been as a service provider that offers managed mailman hosting both for version 2 and 3. I do have the benefit of a decade+ of insight into the use of Mailman from a list admin, moderator, and member point of view simply via my support ticket system that my Mailman clients have access to.
I want to say that I appreciate all of the hard work that has been put into bringing Mailman 3 to life. I also appreciate the forward thinking that shows itself in the including of a REST api with Mailman 3 and the use of and support of databases such as postgreSQL and MySQL.
I have been using Mailman 3 for over a year now in a commercial/production environment and have installed it on several servers using Docker and now from source. I received quite a bit of feedback from users this past year and also lost about 20% of my Mailman 3 users to other competing list/forum applications. The feedback I received was almost entirely due to shortcomings in the user interface.
After much thought, I have decided to break away from the use of Postorius/Hyperkitty. Tomorrow a PHP developer will begin work on brand new admin interface on my behalf. Here are my goals:
Modernize the admin interface to meet modern design and interface standards.
To provide an easy installation approach to the setup and portability of the admin interface.
To reveal everything that Mailman core has via the new admin interface and perhaps to bring in additional features such as the ability to migrate a Mailman 2 list into a Mailman 3 list from a browser interface.
To bring in the use of stats that a list admin would like to see such as overall number of list members, which list is generating the most bounces, subscription/unsubscription rates, etc.
To provide a list creation wizard for list admins that will automatically create a list that has preset settings in place based upon the input during the list creation wizard.
I am sure there are many hurdles to overcome in the process. When the inevitable questions arises that pertain anything to the Mailman side of this project, I hope I can count on this list for assistance. I am also interested in seeing if I can recruit some of you to test out the new admin interface for usability testing when I reach that stage. I am interested to find out if some of you that have enough experience in PHP to help contribute to this project. Bootstrap 4 and User Interface design skills would also be appreciated.
The name of the new admin interface: Affinity
Wish me well with this new project and let me know on or off list of anything that you would like to see change, removed, implemented into a new admin interface.
Brian