Before any details, I'll say the core developers applaud this effort. Though we'd like to think Postorius and HyperKitty are great as far as they go, we've always believed that there are many uses cases for Mailman they can't serve well. That includes but is not limited to close integration with integrated platforms such as cPanel and ticketing systems.
Thank you. I am not concern with other platforms at the moment as I am with coming up with a more modern looking interface that is more intuitive to use. cPanel will probably stay with Mailman 2 for years to come and continue to provide their own patches if need to keep it functional.
I will probably at some point make a serious attempt in coming up with a Wordpress plugin that integrates with Mailman 3.
This is likely to limit the use cases. I encourage you to think carefully about that, and to prioritize the cases you know very well, such as the needs of hosting service administrators. I won't be surprised if you make a lot of ordinary users (subscribers) happy too, but don't get overambitious.
Point taken. My main target is server and list administrators. List members will get some love as well but they are a lower priority.
I myself am not sure why, but Barry has stated that it's hard to do this, at least in the face of current pace of development of Mailman 3 core. I love Barry and deeply respect his judgment, but I find the idea itself offensive :-), so dealing with it on the core side is on my own TODO list. Let's cooperate!
Will do!
This is already possible in Postorius and HyperKitty for "well-behaved" Mailman 2 lists. Unfortunately I don't have a definition of "well-behaved" (yet, and I don't think it's easy to do). :-/ OTOH, from our point of view, this is a site administrator decision, so doing the conversion at Mailman 3 installation time and the site administrator's convenience is the logical process. Do you have a specific use case for this? Do you have users (list administrators or virtual domain administrators) who want to try Mailman 3 lists but continue some of their lists with Mailman 2? (I still think this is unlikely to be something core development would prioritize, but I'd like to have real data about it.)
I have in mind Mailman 2 list admins that are using Mailman via cPanel. cPanel dropped a bomb last September (I think) with a huge price increase for license users. The results were some large hosts made their intentions known that they were leaving cPanel for alternative or custom developed control panels. Most of these will not include Mailman or even any MLM application. So I suspect a lot of these users will need to be finding homes for their Mailman 2 lists and I think when any these come my way, and some have, it would be a good time to introduce them to Mailman 3.
Two obstacles have hinder me in converting Mailman 2 users to Mailman 3:
-- high load times for Mailman 3 processes -- less features for the mailing list side of Mailman (which Mailman 2 users held in higher priority) even though the archive side (Hyperkitty) had significant improvements to offer over pipermail.
The high load times I was seeing was a concern but the recent upgrades to Mailman 3 has resolved them and now Mailman 3 hums along very nicely. However the lack of bounce processing, at least in the past, and other features, held me back from marketing the benefits of Mailman 3 to them.
These are surely going to require core-side features. Speaking for myself, they are desirable features, and I'm pretty sure the core developers will agree.
I am hoping to generate some of these stats from the logs of the MTA. cPanel uses something called eximstats to put mail statistics from Exim's logs into a MySQL database. It polls the data on a server and account wide basis. I absolutely love it because it tells me immediately which lists are not playing nice. I want list admins to have access to something like that so they can see what is going on with their roster. Most of my cPanel list admins don't bother going into cPanel to make use of eximstats. So I want to bring something like that to them in this new admin interface.
These features (and more) are already implemented in the Systers forks of Mailman. I can introduce some of their developers (if interested, let's talk off-list, I don't have names and contacts off-hand).
Is this a fork off of Mailman 3? Feel free to contact me anytime because I am interested to see what is out there.
Again, this is going to require cooperation from core. We have a feature called "list templates" for Mailman 3 in core, which we intend to expose fully in Postorius and populate with common templates. Ask Abhilash, who knows it best I think.
I forgot about those templates and came across them today. They would work but I want something a little more powerful and elegant for list admins to use. I am trying to hit a home run with this. I may end up doing a bunt instead and getting thrown out at 1st.
The name of the new admin interface: Affinity "Affinity for Mailman [3]". I like it! Steve
Thank you!
Brian