Dear Mailman Developers
Affinity Mailman is our new admin interface for Mailman 3 and we intend
to use it to replace Postorius. It has been under development for about
3 months now and it recently reached beta.
Calling For Beta Testers
Now that Affinity is in beta, we are looking for list admins to help us
beta test it. We are interested in getting some feedback and feature
requests from beta users. If you are interested in helping us test out
Affinity and get a sneak peek of the future of Mailman administration,
then email me at brian_carpenter(a)emwd.com
<mailto:brian_carpenter@emwd.com?subject=Affinity%20Beta&body=I%20am%20interested%20in%20Beta%20Testing%20Affinity>
and I will begin the process of setting you up with an Affinity Mailman
admin account and provide 2 test lists to use for beta testing purposes.
While I am at it:
Empathy Is Now Under Development
"So what in the world is Empathy? I mean really - first Affinity and now
Empathy?"
That is correct. We figured if we are going to replace the default admin
UI (Postorius) for Mailman 3, we might as well replace the default
forum/archive UI (Hyperkitty) for Mailman 3. With Empathy, we are
bringing a beautiful and user-friendly experience for those who wish to
use Mailman 3 as a modern forum. We want Empathy to bring a true
community like approach to the use of Mailman 3 via a browser. It will
supplement the mailing list feature of Mailman 3 with an easy to use
online forum. So Mailman 3 users will get the best of both worlds: a
modern mailing list app AND a modern forum app. Empathy can also be used
to display your list threads (archives) in an easy-to-read manner, and
those threads can be categorized by tags and will be searchable.
--
Please let me know if you need further assistance.
Thank you for your business. We appreciate our clients.
Brian Carpenter
EMWD.com
--
EMWD's Knowledgebase:
https://clientarea.emwd.com/index.php/knowledgebase
EMWD's Community Forums
http://discourse.emwd.com/
Made it through the first week of development of Affinity. A decent amount of progress was made today. Here is a preliminary screenshot of the login page for Affinity:
https://static.emwd.com/uploads/2020/03/affinity_login-1030x728.png
Let me know what you think. I will be posting screen shots via this thread as more progress is made.
Brian
brian_carpenter(a)emwd.com writes:
> Made it through the first week of development of Affinity. A decent
> amount of progress was made today. Here is a preliminary screenshot
> of the login page for Affinity:
>
> https://static.emwd.com/uploads/2020/03/affinity_login-1030x728.png
Thanks for the update!
Looking forward to shots of the screens with config controls on them. :-)
Steve
On 6/18/20 12:45 PM, Brian Carpenter wrote:
> Dear Mailman Developers
>
> Affinity Mailman is our new admin interface for Mailman 3 and we intend
> to use it to replace Postorius. It has been under development for about
> 3 months now and it recently reached beta.
Just to be clear, Brian has the full support of the GNU Mailman project
in his endeavor to create a new web UI for Mailman 3, but "our" above
means Brian and EMWD, not the GNU Mailman project. We of the GNU Mailman
project are delighted that Brian is working on an alternative web UI,
but we have no plan to abandon Postorius and HyperKitty.
--
Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hello Brian,
Bravo. I applaud this initiative.
Not that you may be concerned, perhaps, but Affinity is the name of a
very popular and excellent Photoshop alternative. They obviously don't
own the name, but you are always going to sort well below them in
terms of SEO and so on.
All the best for this great idea.
Andrew
On Mon, 2 Mar 2020 at 12:14, <brian_carpenter(a)emwd.com> wrote:
>
> The name of the new admin interface: Affinity
Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Hello Brian,
> Bravo. I applaud this initiative.
> Not that you may be concerned, perhaps, but Affinity is the name of a
> very popular and excellent Photoshop alternative. They obviously don't
> own the name, but you are always going to sort well below them in
> terms of SEO and so on.
> All the best for this great idea.
> Andrew
You haven't seen my SEO skills have you. ;^).
Linking Affinity with Mailman should produce the results I need. Thanks for the heads up though!
Brian
In our development work of Affinity, we are testing out the use of
Hyperkitty. HK requires gunicorn but we can't get gunicorn to start
because it is looking for a module name Postorius. I have Postorius
commented out in settings_local.py and settings.py. Gunicorn still won't
start. How can we start gunicorn without the need for having Postorius
installed?
--
Please let me know if you need further assistance.
Thank you for your business. We appreciate our clients.
Brian Carpenter
EMWD.com
--
EMWD's Knowledgebase:
https://clientarea.emwd.com/index.php/knowledgebase
EMWD's Community Forums
http://discourse.emwd.com/
On 6/2/20 7:10 PM, Brian Carpenter wrote:
> In our development work of Affinity, we are testing out the use of
> Hyperkitty. HK requires gunicorn but we can't get gunicorn to start
> because it is looking for a module name Postorius. I have Postorius
> commented out in settings_local.py and settings.py. Gunicorn still
> won't start. How can we start gunicorn without the need for having
> Postorius installed?
>
I solved it. I had to comment out the lines in the Middleware and
Template sections of settings.py.
--
Please let me know if you need further assistance.
Thank you for your business. We appreciate our clients.
Brian Carpenter
EMWD.com
--
EMWD's Knowledgebase:
https://clientarea.emwd.com/index.php/knowledgebase
EMWD's Community Forums
http://discourse.emwd.com/
On 6/2/20 4:10 PM, Brian Carpenter wrote:
> In our development work of Affinity, we are testing out the use of
> Hyperkitty. HK requires gunicorn but we can't get gunicorn to start
> because it is looking for a module name Postorius. I have Postorius
> commented out in settings_local.py and settings.py. Gunicorn still won't
> start. How can we start gunicorn without the need for having Postorius
> installed?
I was about to send this when your follow-up arrived.
Is postorius commented/removed from INSTALLED_APPS, MIDDLEWARE and
TEMPLATES{'OPTIONS': {'context_processors': } in the settings files?
Are the references to postorius.urls commented/removed from urls.py
--
Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
brian_carpenter(a)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.
> 2. 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.
> 3. 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.)
> 4. 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).
> 5. 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
