[Mailman-Users] Web UI request

[Allan Odgaard]

On 18 Jun 2008, at 17:41, Terri Oda wrote:

> [...] the more user input we get, the better!

Another thread said that “the web UI is scheduled for overhaul”.

Is anyone assigned to this? Is it an open process? Can we follow it  
somewhere?

I think the admin UI suffers from:

   1. Too many options.
   2. Weak categorization.
   3. Typographically bad, e.g. no visual cues about significance,  
related options, etc. and right-aligned labels make it difficult to  
skim down through a page.
   4. Labels are too verbose, contributing with noise to the overall  
view, and the “Details for «the_mailman_option_name»” under each label  
does not help in this regard.

I believe the current UI is generated from the Defaults.py, which is a  
contributing factor to some of the above. Is the plan to keep  
generating the UI, or would it be OK to actually design a UI?  
Switching to a designed one means more work when adding new options  
that require UI, but considering that the current UI has been the same  
for as long as I can remember, it’s not exactly a moving target.

Also, having the lists themselves stored as pickled objects make it  
problematic to leave stuff out of the web UI, but I would strongly  
suggest that the lists switch to using a plain text format.

Anyway, for the overhauled web UI, I will gladly participate in the  
process, if I am welcomed, but I think it might be a little  
controversial because I probably want to cut all the options I  
consider unnecessary, for example does an admin really need a web UI  
for setting whether or not digest users are allowed to switch to  
immediate mail delivery? etc.

I think a first step would be to find out what options actually are  
necessary in the web UI (and presently there are some stuff not  
available that I would like to have there, for example the list URLs  
really should be visible in the web UI). Next step would then be to  
categorize this stuff sensibly, and after that, we can look at mockups.

But as indicated above, at least step 1 should probably not be done  
“by committee” because you want to be harsh and not include some  
arcane option that one guy argue is really very useful to him :)

If the pickled lists were instead plain text, that would be much  
easier, because then it could be a very clearly stated goal that the  
web UI is for the stuff most of us want most of the time, and for the  
more exotic stuff, there is the list config file.