Oh, goodness, Ethan... I was excited when Barry told me we were getting a SoC student to do this, and you sound *exactly* what we need. I'll try to restrain myself from declaring everlasting love until I've seen some finished work, but I will say that I'm very happy to have you on the project. (Even if I'll probably have to rewrite all the docs once you're done... ;) )
- Integration with look/feel of people's existing websites
As others have said, the biggest question I get from people is usually along the lines of "How can I make Mailman fit in to the rest of my website?" Some of the, you aren't going to have much control over (Top of list: why can't we just have users with one password for mailman and everything else?) but things like making the interface all css friendly (is the plan for it to be all xhtml-compliant?) and providing configurable headers and footers will make a pretty huge difference right there.
- Simplified (possibly customizable?) interface as an option
I'd also like to see it possible to make a page that contains a simplified version of the interface. I, as a geek, love having a billion settings to mess with, but lots of list managers aren't so inclined, and it'd be nice to give them just a simple (customizable) set of functions so they don't throw up their hands and decide that mailman is too scary. This could probably be done if the xhtml gives us control over each item to be displayed, and different people could use different templates with the options they don't want/need turned off. I can imagine even terribly technical users might like to have a mailman admin page which just contains the things they use most often so they don't have to delve into the entire interface all the time.
This might, incidentally, help a lot with the completeness-versus-simplicity problem that is inherent in all interfaces. It might also make my job as a documenter hellishly difficult when people start emailing me and saying "but I don't have that option!" but I can deal with that. ;)
- Organization
I dislike the way the list admin interface is currently organized.
People are forever looking for things in the wrong places, which is
probably a sign that the things are in the wrong places and we should
maybe move them. :) I wish I had time to figure out what these places
are and tell you, but if you start finding the same thing, or you get
people testing your designs and going to the wrong spot, make note,
please?
- Wishful thinking....
I don't suppose you'll have time to make some of the options less utterly confusing? For example, I've yet to have anyone guess what an umbrella list was and what it's for unless they were already familiar with mailing lists...
- Archives?
Are you going to get a chance to touch the archives? A lot of the same things apply for templating there, and people always want that same look/feel.
Of course, I really really want to replace pipermail with something a
bit more modern (I'm looking at finding a nice way to use apache's
mbox_mod for my current lists -- if anyone's got instructions for that,
drop me a line!), but I think that's a little outside your scope. :)
Still, getting it so the archives at least use the same CSS might be
nice.
I'll probably think of a dozen more things to say later, but as everyone else seems to have covered the most important things I'll try to restrain myself a bit. :) I'm very excited to see this happen, though -- I think the web interface is often heralded as one of Mailman's strengths, and it'll be nice to see it a bit more polished and modern and less like someone's opened up a dusty panel and let us grab all the live wires we want. :)
Terri