[Mailman3-dev] User interface for mailing list archives

[Barry Warsaw]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 09:33, Robin Munn wrote:
> It's been a while since I had any time to look at Mailman, and from the
> silence of this list, it seems I'm not the only one. Let's remedy this
> situation with some discussion. :-)

Unfortunately, I've been in the same boat.  Thanks for jump starting the
discussions!

> I've long felt that Mailman's built-in Web interface to the archives was
> poor to middling at best. It works, but it could be so much better. I
> was going to sit down and try to design a better way to do mailing list
> archives, but then I came across the Lurker project
> (http://lurker.sourceforge.net/) and realized that someone else had
> already done the hard work. To see Lurker in action, check out
> http://webwareforpython.org/archives/list/sqlobject-discuss.en.html

A quick (literally 2 minute) look shows some promise.  There are some
nice elements, but also some non-intuitive elements to the u/i, at least
for me.  What exactly does the activity column and the sigma column
mean?  The thread view is kind of nice.  The attachment MIME types seem
broken (text/plain downloads with a .attach suffix so my web browser
doesn't know it's text).  The fact that it's been i18n'd is a good sign
that it can handle messages in different languages/charsets.

> Lurker is GPL'ed, but it's written in C++, so just incorporating it
> wholesale into Mailman 3 would likely be a non-trivial exercise. But we
> could certainly learn from its interface.
> 
> Am I the only one who's dissatisfied with the current state of Mailman's
> archive pages, or do others feel the same way? Anyone else know of other
> mailing list archivers that we could learn lessons from?

I think everyone feels the same way you do, Robin!  If nothing else, I
think we could definitely modernize the interface to use relevant
current web technologies.  Of course, my dream is also to provide
read-only imap and nntp access to the archives as well so people can use
applications built for viewing email natively.

As another, more radical approach, take a look at Ka-Ping Yee's Zest
archiver <http://zesty.ca/zest/>.   There some really, really nice
things he's done with this, and it's all in Python. :)

-Barry

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