[Mailman-Developers] some more futures on mailman...

[Chuq Von Rospach]

Just want to toss these into the archives for future consideration...

I'm currently trying (desperately) to get a system into production 
that involves mailman. Or more correctly, a site with multiple 
virtual hosts.

My medium-term plan is to run mailing lists across three domains 
(www.plaidworks.com, www.hockeyfanz.com, www.chuqui.com). And using 
mailman, I'm finding it's simply impossible to create a consistent 
look/feel on a single domain, because it doesn't (yet) easily let me 
do things like footers/headers (and yes, I know there's a patch 
pending for that) -- but when we start talking about running a single 
instance of mailman across multiple virtual hosts, this all dies a 
horrible death.

The only real way t do this now is to run an instance of mailman for 
each virtual host. That's really, really gnarly from a maintenance 
standpoit, nt to mention just rife with the ability to get it wrong 
on deadline -- and even then, mailman isn't really cooperative about 
living within a site's look/feel yet..

So it's beginning to look like we need to find a way present a 
look/feel based on domain name, defining sets of headers/footers on a 
per domain basis, but there are also other pages that generally need 
tweaking (most especially, every domain probably needs to tweak 
/mailman/listinfo to some degree, even if it's changing the 
introductory text....)

I don't have time to figure out how to fix this yet, but I wanted to 
throw it into the mix until I do. Right now, I'm dealing with it the 
way you normally do on deadline -- by punting and going production 
without an integrated look/feel (don't feel bad, I have the same 
problem with my discussion forums, albeit those don't cross domains 
so the solutions are in theory easier).

This is all clearly post 2.0 stuff, but it needs to go On The List....

Hmm. If we take the pending patch for global headers/footers, add a 
tweak so we can define them by domain (header-hockeyfanz.com-html, et 
al), we might be able to fake this. But we still need to add another 
tweak to allow us to store that listinfo intro paragraph into a file, 
and do the same vhosting hack to it, too.

Maybe it *can* be done, or at least hide enough of it. But I'll look 
at this further after I go live. Running out of time...

chuq (here I go again...)
-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"