[Mailman-Developers] Templating the interface

[Barry Warsaw]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On May 2, 2007, at 10:22 AM, A.M. Kuchling wrote:

> On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 09:41:58AM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> initially and ran into problems there too.  He may have moved to
>> Genshi toward the end of the project.  I know there are many other
>> templating systems out there, such as PTL (from Quixote) but I don't
>> have much experience with them.  I would encourage folks who have
>
> I think the critical question is audience: who will be customizing
> Mailman?  Can we assume they know XML?  can they keep their HTML
> well-formed XML? will they use an HTML editor or just a text editor
> like vi/emacs?

Great questions, thanks Andrew.  Here are my thoughts, but I'm open  
to other opinions.

Related to the different levels of customizability, I'd say that it  
should be easy for folks to change some color schemes and basic look  
with just a passing understanding of CSS.  That suggests weekend  
warrior web designers with a text editor and something like http:// 
www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp open in their browsers.

> So, who do we picture customizing Mailman's templates?  Core
> developers?  Sysadmins?  Skilled web designers?  Beginning web
> designers?

For anything more complex, I think our audience is skilled web  
designers and experienced developers.  As much as possible, I'd like  
for someone who is a moderately to very skilled web designer, and  
understands XHTML and XML but probably not Python, to be able to do  
80% of the web customization they'd need.  I think it's okay if we  
relegate the really complex 20% (e.g. ditching our wsgi web publisher  
and integrating with Zope) to be a skilled Python developer.

One thing this will require from the core is moving all the logic out  
of the Mailman/Cgi modules and into the core libraries.  This will  
also make it feasible to mirror more of the web functionality into  
other channels, such as email and command line (or possibly even a  
fat u/i interface).  That's a task that's on my list for the trunk.

> (I'd rule out Quixote's PTL: too idiosyncratic, and Mailman's target
> audience may want to customize the look while not knowing Python.
> Plus the import hook complicates life.)

That's great to know, thanks!
- -Barry

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin)

iQCVAwUBRjiq33EjvBPtnXfVAQJfPwP/YVaBXtt8QUsJQ+1bO5Mctvaj0ChAdAe2
TS52Mc3Zk0jSKWL7eCMKbUpyvTS5s87wtTUAi2jq6VietyErRotDT4Gj8gCCpWo0
gtCzOemC9VkicWAuc02D1MtYjXPVOlVmezU9yKrjJIn3KVoUiGqP8Y9LGvyj3umN
o7rDqO7jIww=
=mMNm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----