[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Terri Oda]

Since I've largely finished up the coding contract that was eating up  
a lot of my time, I'm thinking that I'd like to do some coding for  
fun.  And nothing says fun like trying to fix the Mailman archives! ;)

I'm trying to remember all the things people have suggested for the  
archives in the past so I can figure out what needs to be done and  
what might be nice to have, and see if this is doable in the time I  
have in the foreseeable future.

The big things people wanted most, if I recall correctly, included:

- modernized HTML/CSS/Themes (preferably to match a modernized web  
interface... is that all set up now?)
- archive links that won't break if the archive is rebuilt
- better address obfuscation (maybe by generating pages through cgi)
- search
- not adding a billion dependencies to Mailman

Here's the list from the wiki's Mailman 2.2 page: http:// 
wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+2.2

     *  Reconsider using a 3rd-party archiver
     * Perhaps URLs to messages should be based on message-ids  
instead of message numbers so that regenerating archives can't break  
links. This must include backward compatible links
     * Ditch direct access and vend all archive messages through CGI  
so that we can do address obfuscation, and message deletion, etc. on  
the fly (with caching of course, but have to worry about web crawlers).
     * Add RSS feed
     * Allow for admins to remove or edit messages through the web.
     * Move archive threads into another list?
     * Put archives in the list/mylist directory.
     * Add a search option
     * Make archives default template look and feel similar to Web UI  
(whatever it looks like after the Summer of Code project is done)
     * Make archive templatable (at least by changing CSS) so they  
can match people's existing site look-and-feel
     * MUAs usually make URLs clickable. An new Archive could be used  
when posts are distributed, in the footer, so that each message has a  
link to the whole thread in the Archive.
     * Present all messages in a thread at once, and offer plaintext  
download of the whole thread
     * Put messages into a database and/or move away from mbox as the  
canonical storage format.

So the questions are:

(1) Is anyone working on this already?
(2) What else is on people's wish lists for a pipermail replacement?

  Terri