[Mailman-Developers] message board functionality?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JR" == John Reekie <johnr@eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:

    JR> User accounts are a great idea, but I would like to suggest
    JR> that it be done so that websites that _already have_ user
    JR> accounts can integrate mailman easily. Sites with accounts are
    JR> popping up like mushrooms after the rain :) and it would be
    JR> awesome if mailman had an interface that allowed them to
    JR> "wrap" mailman in their existing setup.

So it sounds like there are a couple of issues here.  One is making
Mailman's web interface customizable so that you can make it look like
it's an integrated part of the site.  It sounds like you go to a lot
of work to make this happen.  I have some thoughts on this based on
the ht2html scripts[1] I wrote, but I'm not sure if they're general or
flexible enough.  Then again, maybe using style sheets would get us
close enough.

Second, it sounds like you want to perhaps have a Mailman hook for
authenticating users.  Would it be enough to design an API that
Mailman would call, given an email address (future: login name) and a
password, and ask if they matched?  This way, you could write a little 
Python glue code to consult any password database available.

-Barry

[1] http://www.python.org/~bwarsaw/software/pyware.html