Hello, I run a mid-sized website (http://eh.net) for the Economic History Association, with some associated mailing lists. These lists have traditionally been very "moderated" (since we switched to Mailman, they've been left in "emergency" moderation mode) and our moderators insist on being able to edit the messages waiting in the moderation queue.

I have already put together a terribly ugly little hack to manage this: I've added a link on the moderation page to edit a particular message; this passes the message's ID to a Python script entirely out of Mailman (protected by regular HTTP authentication) which proceeds to read the pickled file and display the message and certain key fields in a form, which another Python script will read and modify the original messages. (There's a little more going on here, actually, but if I told you the exact details you'd make fun of it. Heck, I make fun of it.) This method is suboptimal, particularly when it's fed messages in certain encoding schemes. And my unholy scheme for passing these data around between scripts is nigh unto reaching its limits.

Now, the first item on Mailman's Wishlist for list administration is "Allow the moderator to edit posts being held for approval". I would like to reimplement this in a more clean fashion, prefrably properly integrated with Mailman.

Taking a look at the developer wiki, however, I'm not quite sure where I should get started, and I'm note quite sure how up to date it is (due to little tidbits like "The current plan is to release Mailman 2.1 final by the end of 2002. It's been long overdue. Sigh.") There's also talk of Mailman 3. So...

I'd just like to know what Mailman developers (presumably with more experience than I have) think about the best way to proceed, what versions of Mailman would be most amenable to this sort of a modification, if there's any sort of "Getting Started Hacking Mailman" or architectural overview of which I am not aware... whether I should bother with the IRC channels... and, to be specific on at least one topic, how the CGI wrappers in the mailman/cgi-bin/ directory are set up and operated.