Background for folk new to this discussion:
Currently, all user information is stored in Mailman core, but it's minimal: a real name, a set of email addresses, subscription info, and preferences. Barry suggests that it should stay minimal: only the things Mailman needs to know to correctly deliver mail (which actually doesn't include "real name" but let's leave that as a legacy item for the moment)
It's pretty likely that future features of Mailman will want to attach extra information to users. Some of it will be social-y stuff like user icons for HyperKitty to display in the archives. Other things include metrics like "when did this person last post to the list?" or "how many posts have they made over the lifetime of this list?" One thing I know of is that Systers requires a short essay for all new subscribers, explaining why they want to join the list. (And they're considering porting this feature to Postorius, which means we potentially want an answer to "where will the extra profile data get stored?" before their students start coding.)
So...
I think we've sort of agreed that it would be best if whatever we built just had a rest interface and hyperkitty/postorius/whatever would talk to it through there, and could share data that way, but we need a simple prototype that folk (particularly students) will be able to start using, and there's still some internal architecture decisions that need to be made.
Does anyone have time to build such a thing or write up some short architectural documents so a student could build such a thing in relatively short order? It doesn't have to be the perfect final design, but we probably need a basic starter api for adding, accessing, editing and possibly even removing profile data.
Thoughts?
Terri