[Mailman-Developers] message board functionality?

[John Reekie]

> The biggest problem that I have is remembering all the dang passwords,
> both user and admin passwords, that I have to use every day.  So I
> would go one step further; I would let the site administrator
> designate which user accounts can have admin privileges for which
> lists, so they'd only have to remember one password to administer any
> list of theirs.

User accounts are a great idea, but I would like to suggest
that it be done so that websites that _already have_ user accounts
can integrate mailman easily. Sites with accounts are popping up like
mushrooms after the rain :) and it would be awesome if mailman had
an interface that allowed them to "wrap" mailman in their existing
setup.

Of course, my motivation for this request is entirely selfish :-)
To make this more concrete, this is the kind of stuff I do now to
make mailman appear to be an integrated part of an existing site
with user accounts:

* Manufacture a password
* Generate a query string with the password
* Call apache via http and get the headers
* Extract the cookie
* Generate another query string with the user data
* Call apache back with the cookie and the query string
* Get the HTML back and strip out everything but the body
* Munge the body to change URLs.
* Plonk what's left into my own auto-generated HTML and
  send it back to the browser.

Amazingly enough, this actually works. The reason for doing it this
way was so I didn't have to modify MailMan (apart from about ten
lines commented out). And of course I don't want users who are
already logged in to enter any passwords or accept any more
cookies.

Anyway, if this sounds like it's worth at least discussing
I am more than happy to help figure out how to go about it
and volunteer to contribute a PHP script as an example of
MailMan integration (the rest of my site is written in PHP).

Thanks!

JohnR