[Mailman-Developers] Priority/status of moderated-edit and external user DB

[admin at chirolists.com]

Barry,

You are right about Python. Fun and not too tough to learn.

What kind of help are you looking for? I've been programming for a 
while...I started on a Trash 80 back in the day. Mostly been doing 'web/db 
stuff the past few years.

I've started playing around with some of the admindb stuff, working on 
getting the interface to look a bit more purdy. I was planning to poke 
around and see if I could set up a way to allow an admin to more easily add 
a logo to all pages, etc.

Brian

At 04:58 PM 5/1/2003 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 21:19, Kevin McCann wrote:
>
> > 1) External user database. I'm sure you're all aware of the desire of some
> > folks to have this. I found a Wiki document somewhere on the zope.org site
> > that had discussions on this but I believe it was somewhat dated. Have any
> > conclusions been reached with respect to the direction here? I think I read
> > talk of a Zope-specific solution. I'm wondering if this means that we're
> > likely never to see a Mailman that can talk to a MySQL database. I believe
> > this one feature alone would elevate Mailman significantly. How hgh of a
> > priority is this to the development team and what is the status? Are there
> > current discussions on this somewhere other than the list (wiki boards,
> > chats, what-have-you) , and if so, may I take part?
>
>This mailing list is the best place to discuss such things.  Wiki
>gardening takes too much time. ;}
>
>As Jeff Waugh mentions, Mailman 2.1 provides an interface through which
>it does all its user access, and a MailList extension mechanism you can
>use to substitute other MemberAdaptor implementations for the default
>legacy one.
>
>While the 2.1 approach is a step in the right direction (I have an
>experimental BerkeleyDB-based backend checked into the cvs head), there
>are a few problems with it:
>
>- It is a pretty inefficient interface for some tasks, most notably the
>admin membership management u/i.  To build this u/i it has to load the
>entire user database into memory, even to display just a chunk of 30
>addresses.
>
>- The design is still list-centric.  While I believe you could implement
>a backend that unifies the user database (e.g. barry at zope.com on list1
>has the same user profile as barry at zope.com on list2), I want to make
>this much more evident in the interface designs.  I want to invert the
>focus of Mailman from being list-centric to being user-centric.
>
> > 2) Moderated-edit. I'm running Mailman on a couple of boxes but I also have
> > a few hundred lists on a box running Lyris. I want to move them but one of
> > the deal breakers at the moment is moderated-edit - the ability of a
> > moderator to edit a message before it goes out. I personally don't use this
> > feature for the lists I am the admin of but this seems to be a very
> > important feature to some. An absolute must, in fact. I'm wonderig if this
> > is in the cards, is it high on the priority list, should we expect to 
> see it
> > soon?
>
>There is kludgey support for this now, that most people are probably not
>aware of: in the admindb interface, you forward the message to yourself.
>Then you use whatever tools you want to edit the message and resend it
>back to the list with the Approved header.  Then you delete the message
>from the admindb.  Not exactly the most efficient workflow. ;)
>
>The thing that's always held me back here is designing a useable u/i to
>such a feature.  Actually doing the editing probably isn't difficult,
>but I'm far from a web u/i expert.  Doing it in a way that won't get
>clobbered by huge messages, be vulnerable to cross-site scripting or
>other security issues, and that provides a natural editing interface, is
>a big task.  I wish there was some free tool we could just bolt on to do
>this -- I'm wondering if something like SquirrelMail could be
>appropriated for the task?
>
> > I understand this is a non-paying gig for Barry and others, and I 
> understand
> > there are likely a ton of other items to deal with. But knowing what the
> > priority and status of these two items are would give me a realistic 
> idea of
> > when I might be able to drop the oh-so-commercial Lyris.
>
>Hopefully the above gives some indication of the direction. I don't have
>much to say at the moment about ETA for any of this stuff, except that
>I'm beginning to experiment and write interfaces.
>
> > Finally, I'm not a Python programmer (yet), mostly Perl and PHP. But if I
> > can help the cause in non-Python coding ways let me know.
>
>I'm sure Python will be easy for you to pick up <wink>.
>
>I wonder if we can start talking about how to get the community to take
>over more of the maintenance of the 2.1 branch so that I can start
>concentrating on the 3.0 work?  Trying to do both in my spare time is
>difficult.
>
>-Barry
>
>
>
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Thanks,

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