[Mailman-Users] Web UI request

[Brad Knowles]

Allan Odgaard wrote:

> 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?

This is a development issue, and would be discussed on the 
mailman-developers mailing list.  The rest of this thread should really be 
moved over there.

> I believe the current UI is generated from the Defaults.py, which is a 
> contributing factor to some of the above.

The Web UI is generated by various bits of Python code throughout the 
system.  Defaults.py is how standard defaults are picked up that are used 
throughout all of Mailman -- not just the Web UI.

The Web UI and the rest of the Mailman code are pretty tightly integrated. 
You can't just rip out one file and replace it with something else, and have 
everything magically changed.

> 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.

In Mailman3, I believe that all of this stuff is going to be stored in a 
proper database, and not in Python pickles.  With the appropriate back-end 
database connector, you should be able to choose what database is used to 
store this information.

> 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.

We're going the opposite direction.  There may be a simplified WebUI that is 
available to certain users or certain administrators, but we've had too many 
problems with things that can only be done by the site admin who has full 
privileged access to the server in question.


For Mailman3, I believe that one of the goals is that *EVERYTHING* that can 
possibly be done with Mailman will be do-able through at least the full 
incarnation of the WebUI.

At that point, everything the site admin can do could be done through the 
site admin WebUI, and if they wanted to restrict certain features/functions 
from being visible to the list owners or moderators, they would be able to 
do that, but you would no longer require any privileged command-line access 
to the server in question, unless you were doing the first-time install.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at python.org>
Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the
mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists