Chris,
Sounds good, I'll be looking for your draft later on.
I'm hoping to get the interface squared away soon at which point any
help would be wonderful for the conversion of mailman to use the interface and the development of any datasources that people would wish Mailman to use.
I'll be happy to help as I can, I can certainly help in the end step, step 4, by testing/converting the ACS to use your interface.
When you write,
Phase 3: Develop Php front-end for Archives/Admin utils
That makes me curious. I know Tcl (and C, LISP, etc.) but not Python or PHP. One reason for undertaking this project was to give me something "real" to focus on while learning Python. My understanding was that Python and PHP are somewhat competing technologies. Mailman is a Python tool right? What makes you choose Php for front-end development?
Thanks,
Jerry
At 12:16 PM 3/13/01 -0500, Chris Ryan wrote:
Jerry,
Currently I'm working on developing code for Mailman that will allow
Mailman to work using any appropiate datasource. I plan on implimenting the flatfile (currently what is used today) and a PostgreSQL database datasource. I should have the first draft of the interface up on the Mailman ZWiki page by the end of the day. Stay tuned for more information on that.
In regards to a Mail/Forum combination that is also one of my end
goals. The following plan is as such for entire layout:
Phase 1: Mailman uses database for configuration Phase 2: Mailman uses database for archives Phase 3: Develop Php front-end for Archives/Admin utils Phase 4: Incorporate/develop a forum ontop of previous changes
In the spirit of open source the first 3 phases will be contributed
back to Mailman in some manner. I don't know all the details about phase 4 as of yet so I can't say if that will be contributed back or not as a usefull piece for Mailman.
I'm hoping to get the interface squared away soon at which point any
help would be wonderful for the conversion of mailman to use the interface and the development of any datasources that people would wish Mailman to use.
Chris Ryan chris@greatbridge.com
Jerry Asher wrote:
I would like to unify mailman with an ACS bboard. The Open ACS (http://openacs.org) is a toolkit developing interactive community websites based on PostgreSQL and Tcl. ACS Bboards are just what they sound like, a discussion forum in which visitors to a site can post questions, or post answers to the questions that others have asked.
Currently the ACS system is such that visitors can request that follow up answers be sent to them, which the ACS implements by creating hundreds of individual emails and mailing them out. The "From" header is set to a bogus address (bboard-robot) and the Reply-To: header is set to the author of the new answer. Vacation messages get sent back to the author of the post. This means that if you reply to a message, the answer IS NOT posted on the bulletin board.
I would like to "unify" the ACS bulletin board code with "some" mailing list manager. The benefits to the ACS toolkit I perceive would include:
1 detecting/catching vacation messages 2 detecting/catching/(and maybe unsubscribing) bounces 3 ability to post directly to the bulletin from email (and have the posts end up in the right threads)
4 but I am worried about mail loops.
Can someone tell me "how well" Mailman performs at detecting/catching vacation and bounce messages?
I know little about mailing lists, or Mailman, or mail headers. But with a few pointers, I am willing to learn.
I wonder what the issues involved in this unification are? Are the four issues I am interested/worried significant enough that it makes sense to want to delegate this to Mailman? Or would it be easier/satisfactory to "just change the headers of the outgoing emails, and create some sort of procmail script to process new messages and post them into the right
thread?
If you feel that unification would be useful for my purposes, can someone tell me the right "places" in Mailman to get started? If I want to "inject" a message into Mailman for sending out to others, how would I do that? If I wanted to "capture" the incoming message for processing, where do I look for that? And how might I implement threading?
Thank you,
Jerry Asher
Jerry Asher jerry@hollyjerry.org 1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161 Tel: (510) 549-2980 Berkeley, CA 94709 Fax: (877) 311-8688
Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
===================================================== Jerry Asher jerry@hollyjerry.org 1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161 Tel: (510) 549-2980 Berkeley, CA 94709 Fax: (877) 311-8688