[Mailman-Developers] Storing additional user data

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 11:50  AM, Chris Boulter wrote:

> Yes, I can imagine others might be also interested in storing data in
> addition to subscribers' email addresses - having external system UIDs 
> would
> help with 'single sign-on' integration too, which I've seen discussed 
> here.
>
>> In your case, I'm wondering if some arrangement could be made so that
>> email delivery unifies everything with "the foreign system", and your 
>> user
>> just uses that ID as an email address.  Put the final destination 
>> address
>> in an LDAP database and have sendmail look it up.
>
> This sounds interesting. So you're suggesting that rather than storing
> email addresses of subscribers in Mailman, we store our external system
> UIDs, then have sendmail resolve those into email addresses just 
> before the
> mail gets sent?

Personally, I wouldn't try to extend Mailman to do this. Instead, I'd 
set it up so Mailman could use external data sources easily, and allow 
people to write adaptors to fit into that. That way, users could write 
adaptors for their favorite system (php-nuke, slashcode, drupal, yada 
yada yada), where there's already an existing account management system 
in place, and let it manage the subscriptions and feed delivery data to 
mailman, and have mailman feed undeliverable data back to the system.

you risk turning mailman into yet another CMS, rather than allowing 
mailman to interconnect with all of the existing CMS's... the latter is 
a much easier and more powerful task.

If I were to do this, I'd find two volunteers, one running php-nuke, 
one running slashcode, and have them write the plug-ins for those CMSes 
while Barry wrote the interface they'd talk to, and once Mailman worked 
friendly with both of those, it'd likely work easily with any CMS.

chuq (nope. haven't been thinking about doing that myself. nope. not 
me. Just shooting from the hip here)