[Mailman-Users] Integrating mailman with joomla/mambo

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:55 AM -0700 4/23/07, David Southwell wrote:

>  There was a interesting aside about some work done by Scot Harris but no link
>  to  him e or to the software mentioned or even an indication that the results
>  of his work are available in the public domain.

What I put in the FAQ is still the last word I heard from Curtis, and 
my understanding is that he helped fund an important step forward in 
the area of integrating Joomla! and Mailman.  I have not heard of any 
new information on this front.

If you have more recent information in this area, or know of someone 
who does, please feel free to update the FAQ and let us know.

If you've got better contact with Curtis than I do, and you can drag 
out of him more detail than I've been able to get so far, then please 
do go ahead and update the FAQ entry.

>                                                  The implication of the FAQ
>  was a need to look elsewhere for a generic solution for providing a module
>  giving a full integration for Joomla and mailman. What the FAQ did do was to
>  reinforce what I knew.. that such integration was possible.. but took me no
>  further towards actually doing it.

My understanding is that this is still a pretty raw area.  Mailman 
itself does not provide any hooks to assist with this process, so 
there's a limit to how much we can help.  If there are any tools out 
there to help integrate CMSes with Mailman, the unfortunate fact is 
that the authors of those tools have not coordinated well with the 
Mailman project, and they have not let us know about the work they've 
done.

>  Unfortunately, as in many other places, the FAQ, whilst providing many
>  apparently hopeful mentions, which can be very useful in some instances, it
>  seems that there have not been enough informed contributions.

We've done the best we can based on what anecdotal information we can 
gather, but that's always going to be a hit-or-miss proposition.  If 
the authors of the tools don't coordinate with us, there's not much 
we can do about that.

>                                                                This means the
>  work does not, in many places, have sufficient specific follow ups. Perhaps
>  this is an indication that those of us who are new to mailman might perhaps
>  pay more attention to turning the results of our learning experience into
>  well written contributions that  improve the quality of the  FAQ over time.

That would certainly be a good step forward, yes.  However, it is a 
community-supported document, and if the community does not choose to 
put the effort into doing the work necessary to keep it up-to-date 
and filled with as much useful information as possible, then we will 
all suffer.

I've certainly done as much as I can to contribute to the FAQ Wizard, 
both in terms of generating content itself as well as providing 
editorial assistance to try to make things as easy to understand as I 
can.  But I'm only one person.  We need more people to do the same 
kind of thing, or the FAQ will die -- probably a slow death, but 
perhaps much faster than would otherwise be expected.

>  Do not get me wrong-- I have found the FAQ can be really useful at times, but
>  the Mailman FAQ is a bit of a curates egg. Sometimes it seems like an FAQ but
>  it often seems more like a personal blog rather than a well focused piece of
>  work, written to a consistent, disciplined standard,  giving comprehensive
>  step by step instructions  in response to very specific and well crafted
>  questions.

Yeah, well -- you get what you pay for.

Pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and maybe you 
can get a good professional author to spend their entire life to make 
the FAQ a world-class document, the equal to which cannot be found 
anywhere else in the world.

Otherwise, this is the kind of thing you can expect to get.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>