[Mailman-Developers] HTML Issue

[James Dinan]

> Let's make our lives simple and say that any templated html file must
> include its own html armor (and thus will be HeadlessDocument()
> based), while all non-templated script-generated ones will be
> Document() based to get the standard header and footers.
>
> If you agree, I can start fixing the web ui to conform to this rule.

I certainly agree with that.  In fact, right now I am in the process of
hacking together a custom ui for MM2 which, I am surprised to find, is much
harder than I imagined.  One problem that I have is that somtimes funny
things will happen inside the <MM-...> tags.  Some tags leave white space
after themselves, and I can't really control the presentation of the content
inside of the tags (i.e. font, size, etc) directly, often I have to wrap
them in a container.

I wonder if there might be some way to pull these <MM-...> tags out of the
source and stick them into a library of some sort that you can sustomize for
each list.  I know this would probabbly mean quite a lot of work, but think
of how cool that would be.  ;)  You could have the configuration program
modify the text in the libraries for less advanced users and for more
hardcore hackers they can edit the XML/HTML themselves.

If you're interested to see how far I've gotten, the mailing list I'm
working on (for my summer job) is available at
http://www.gilbertwalker.com/mailman/listinfo/advisorbits.  Assuming I
haven't broken it again it should still be up.  But, you will notice that
there are still many error messages which I cannot touch the HTML for.  :/

Oh yeah, one other idea I had (this really pertains to my particular site
architecture) is that it would be incredibly convenient to have a
customizable page header and footer that could be called via an <MM-...> tag
that you could wrap any sort of content in.  Sort of like making
HeadlessDocument() customizable I guess.

Thanks for all your help!

- jim.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James Dinan <james@gilbertwalker.com>
Gilbert Walker Group: Lenox, MA  U.S.A
Available:  http://www.gilbertwalker.com


> This is certainly one of the problems, which will affect any
> Document()-based web page.  However, Thomas is also right that any
> page that is generated from a template (e.g. subscribe.html) either
> must not include the header stuff, or must use a HeadlessDocument().
> Fixing this is going to take a bit of grunt work, especially if we
> want to allow the html templates to go either way.
>
>
> The more I think about the web ui, the more certain I am that we need
>
> 1) api's so sites can supply any web ui they want, with adaptors for
>    the Mailman "classic" ui.
>
> 2) Mailman's classic ui should be based on something like Zope's
>    Presentation Templates (ZPT).  My understanding is that these will
>    /not/ require sucking in all of Zope (i.e. they can be used
>    standalone), they are quite powerful, and allow for html editing to
>    live nicely with script specialization.  There's the little matter
>    of ZPL/GPL incompatibility that's currently holding me back from
>    investigating this avenue further.
>
> -Barry