Alternate user (and admin) interfaces
I've been searching around for people's experiences implementing alternate web interfaces for Mailman, but I've been surprised not to find much.
The desire to do this seems obvious to me -- there's a lot of different flavors of mailing list (discussion, announce, correspondance management, and many others). The interface tries to support all of these, and is rather overwhelming as a result. Since I haven't found other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) I'm not looking in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not sharing their results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to ask public questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up quickly, (e) or it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of prototypes but nothing serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination or interest to try.
Now that I list them, (a) seems the most likely, but I swear I've really tried to find them. Are their examples people might suggest?
Right now I'm just trying to evaluate the feasibility of creating a trimmed-down interface. Actually a couple interfaces: one for announce list subscribers (*very* minimal), another for announce list administrators (including some posting tools and reports), and another simplified discussion list user interface.
Anyway, I just wanted to see if other people are thinking about this, have already done this, or can give any advise. It doesn't look hard from my first investigation, but I'm also not sure how to best implement -- Mailman's web interface confuses me a bit, and I'm guessing that it's an ad hoc application server. If we go ahead to make this, I suspect we'll want to do something more expedient (i.e., not based on Mailman 3.0), but it would be nice to do this in a way that can be shared, and something that isn't just a hack.
-- Ian Bicking / ianb@colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org
these, and is rather overwhelming as a result. Since I haven't found other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) I'm not looking in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not sharing their results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to ask public questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up quickly, (e) or it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of prototypes but nothing serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination or interest to try.
I'd say (d).
Personnaly I've made a php subscribe/unsuscribe popup page for my site, check it out at http://listes.rezo.net/popup/
-- Fil
Ian Bicking schrieb:
Since I haven't found other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) I'm not looking in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not sharing their results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to ask public questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up quickly, (e) or it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of prototypes but nothing serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination or interest to try.
(f) People don't see a need for that because the interface is working just fine for them ...
-thh
- Ian Bicking
(Yes, I know, old mail, but still)
| I've been searching around for people's experiences implementing | alternate web interfaces for Mailman, but I've been surprised not to | find much. | | The desire to do this seems obvious to me -- there's a lot of | different flavors of mailing list (discussion, announce, | correspondance management, and many others). The interface tries to | support all of these, and is rather overwhelming as a result. Since I | haven't found other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) | I'm not looking in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not | sharing their results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to | ask public questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up | quickly, (e) or it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of | prototypes but nothing serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination | or interest to try.
For me, it was b) (part of a job). I replaced the MembershipAdaptor with something that used a postgresql database and then wrote a completely separate interface to work with the database. Fairly easy, alltogether, though there were some bugs in various parts of Mailman doing assumptions about that you were using OldStyleMemberShipAdaptor (but those were fairly easily fixed, and patches posted).
--
Tollef Fog Heen ,''. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' : . ' -
participants (4)
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Fil -
Ian Bicking -
Thomas Hochstein -
Tollef Fog Heen