brian_carpenter@emwd.com writes:
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:
I do have some comments. :-)
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.
- To provide an easy installation approach to the setup and portability of the admin interface.
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.
- To reveal everything that Mailman core has via the new admin interface
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!
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.
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.)
- 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.
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.
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).
- 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.
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.
The name of the new admin interface: Affinity
"Affinity for Mailman [3]". I like it!
Steve