[Mailman-Developers] Subscribing to several lists from one page

[Benjamin B. Thomas]

Hi there! I've been following Mailman for awhile, and now am about ready to make
heavy use of it. However, I do need to make some changes, and I would like to
ask for some advice as to the best way to get started and how I might do this in
a way that might be beneficial enough to others to be accepted back into the
distribution.

Basically, I would like to have a page like the current listinfo page which
gives the user the ability to subscribe to multiple lists simultaneously (or
have an option to turn this on in the listinfo page). For the usage patterns I
am expecting, it will be burdensome to have the user visit each individual
list's page, subscribe to each list, and then confirm each subscription
separately. I would like to construct an interface similar to the listinfo page
where each list has a "subscribe" check-box along with the email address and
password text boxes at the bottom of the page. The user would check each list
they are interested in, enter his address and password in one convenient
location, hit submit, and only have to reply to one combined confirmation
message.

So, my questions are these:

1) Can this be done in such a way that it would be desirable to fold it back
into the main distribution? I think this would be useful to a number of people
under different circumstances, and I would be willing to generalize it to serve
broader needs.

2) How straightforward would this be? Right now, I am thinking that the major
stumbling block will be integrating all the confirmations into one email and
dealing with that appropriately. Are there some architectural points which would
make this nasty, or should it be fairly easy to pull off?

Cheers,
benjy