[Mailman-Developers] Configurability (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] Mailman 1.0b9)

[Greg Stein]

John Viega wrote:
> 
> Well, my philosophy on the matter is to keep the common tasks easy and
> the expert tasks possible.  So I think there should be a basic
> section, and an advanced section, where there'd be some overlap.  For
> example, in the basic section, you could just say, "give me a
> moderated list", but the fine grained control is available at the
> expert level.  I don't really mind catering to everyone as long as we
> focus on catering to the novice, since that's most people who will be
> administrating or using a list...

This is good only to a point. Many people still feel the need to review
all the options to ensure they have it set properly. Pushing stuff off
to an "Advanced" area requires explicit doc to ensure that people can
comfortably ignore those options.

For example, you couldn't just shift some of the current admin options
to a new screen labeled "Advanced." People will just walk right down the
list of screens and hit the Advanced and they would effectively have all
those knobs available.

Anyways, this seems to be getting more into UI design, than breadth of
configuration.

I still believe in my original point of reducing the number of knobs,
not blindly adding to them under some notion that it helps the user.
Your refinement works for me as long as the Advanced stuff isn't too
readily available (thereby rendering them "not available" for most
intents and purposes).

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/