I finally saw this and would love to respond to the question. The component is indeed up and functioning on my site, and the code is available for anyone who wants to hack away. You can read all about it here:

http://www.backupcentral.com/content/view/108/47/

(I also updated the MailMan FAQ Wizard entry about this idea.)

Scott Harris did this as a favor to me, so I really own the code now and Scott's off the project now that it's up and running. If there's anyone who would like to help further the work, especially in terms of making it more Joomla! friendly, then I'd love to have your help now that it's started.

At 10:55 AM -0700 4/23/07, David Southwell wrote:

There was a interesting aside about some work done by Scot Harris but no link to him e or to the software mentioned or even an indication that the results of his work are available in the public domain.

What I put in the FAQ is still the last word I heard from Curtis, and my understanding is that he helped fund an important step forward in the area of integrating Joomla! and Mailman. I have not heard of any new information on this front.

If you have more recent information in this area, or know of someone who does, please feel free to update the FAQ and let us know.

If you've got better contact with Curtis than I do, and you can drag out of him more detail than I've been able to get so far, then please do go ahead and update the FAQ entry.

                                             The implication of the

FAQ

was a need to look elsewhere for a generic solution for providing a module giving a full integration for Joomla and mailman. What the FAQ did do was to reinforce what I knew.. that such integration was possible.. but took me no further towards actually doing it.

My understanding is that this is still a pretty raw area. Mailman itself does not provide any hooks to assist with this process, so there's a limit to how much we can help. If there are any tools out there to help integrate CMSes with Mailman, the unfortunate fact is that the authors of those tools have not coordinated well with the Mailman project, and they have not let us know about the work they've done.

Unfortunately, as in many other places, the FAQ, whilst providing many apparently hopeful mentions, which can be very useful in some instances, it seems that there have not been enough informed contributions.

We've done the best we can based on what anecdotal information we can gather, but that's always going to be a hit-or-miss proposition. If the authors of the tools don't coordinate with us, there's not much we can do about that.

                                                           This means

work does not, in many places, have sufficient specific follow ups. Perhaps this is an indication that those of us who are new to mailman might

the perhaps

pay more attention to turning the results of our learning experience into well written contributions that improve the quality of the FAQ over time.

That would certainly be a good step forward, yes. However, it is a community-supported document, and if the community does not choose to put the effort into doing the work necessary to keep it up-to-date and filled with as much useful information as possible, then we will all suffer.

I've certainly done as much as I can to contribute to the FAQ Wizard, both in terms of generating content itself as well as providing editorial assistance to try to make things as easy to understand as I can. But I'm only one person. We need more people to do the same kind of thing, or the FAQ will die -- probably a slow death, but perhaps much faster than would otherwise be expected.

Do not get me wrong-- I have found the FAQ can be really useful at times, but the Mailman FAQ is a bit of a curates egg. Sometimes it seems like an FAQ but it often seems more like a personal blog rather than a well focused piece of work, written to a consistent, disciplined standard, giving comprehensive step by step instructions in response to very specific and well crafted questions.

Yeah, well -- you get what you pay for.

Pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and maybe you can get a good professional author to spend their entire life to make the FAQ a world-class document, the equal to which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

Otherwise, this is the kind of thing you can expect to get.

-- Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users> >, Consultant & Author LinkedIn Profile: < <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>