[Mailman-Developers] Mailman Customization Guide?

[Kendall Clark]

Hi all,

First, Mailman is great. Thanks for the work.

Next, I want to customize Mailman by adding a "poll" and a
"document/url archive" option to mailing lists. "Poll", similar to
what eGroups does with this (though they do some dumb stuff here)
allows a list member or admin to define an issue and some
"multiple-choice-style" options, and then list members register their
vote, all of which are tracked. Interface would be something like:
"http://foo.org/mailman/listinfo/<list-name>/poll/<polls-by-name or
id>/vote" and
"http://foo.org/mailman/listinfo/<list-name>/poll/<polls-by-name or
id>/results"

By "document/url archive" I'd like to be able to define a "library"
for a list, a form for submission (even better: a little xml language
that could be cherry-picked from the text of list messages themselves;
but that's "version 2" feature :> ) of URLs and plain text documents;
the url "http://foo.org/mailman/listinfo/<list-name>/archive would
return a page of the archived links and links to the plain text
documents. Yes, this is a bit duplicative of Pipermail, but it's also
very handy to have stuff organized in a non-archival way (not thread
or time or subject based). I imagine the best way to do this is to
store URLs and glob.glob(<the archive directory>) pickled and then
read them off the disk and build the page.

I know how to write Python, but I'm not really sure where to dive into
Mailman first; what is the preferred way of doing extension work like
this is?

In other words, I could probably hack at it long enough to get
something working for me, but maybe, with a bit of guidance for what
these features should look like to be consistent with Mailman's
design, I can manage to do good enough work to submit some patches.

Thanks.

<Kendall/>
--
I'll get a bunch of monkeys, dress 'em up, and make 'em
reenact the Civil War!  Heh, heh, heh!

		-- Homer Simpson
		   Homer The Great