[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] [RELEASED] Mailman 2.1 alpha 3

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2001 10:31:57 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

> 3) and in my non-apple life, I want to build something similar to
> (2), but for my own uses. If I decide to return from
> sabbatical. Or maybe grab an existing thing like php-nuke, and
> wedge mailman onto the side. But it's really clear (to me) that
> this stuff all has to get integrated down the road, and giving a
> user site-wide, consistent administration is a key usability issue
> -- and there's more to life than mail lists. Tools that don't
> integrate, are going to find themselves marginalized or replaced.

I've recently adopted Drupal for my purposes:

  http://www.drop.org/
  http://www.drop.org/node.php?id=411

It has a number of problems, among which ranks horrible navigation.
Its all fairly easily fixable -- as always it just needs doing, and
I have a fairly long TODO list for Drupal.  The Drupal source is
fairly clean, easily extensible, and the core development team is
willing to listen, especially if you keep chanting "integration!"
My biggest challenge is to get them to stop re-inventing the wheel
and instead look to turning Drupal into glue which can be used to
bind any number of external systems together (eg search engine, bug
tracking ticketing, list archives, jabber chat, IRC, polling/survey
system, etc) along with a set of base Drupal features.  Happily the
project is young and flexible enough I think its still possible.
PHP-Nute et al are far too entrenched.

So far I've gotten them off MySQL only and onto PEAR and thus
PostgresQL.  I'm currently writing a unified namespace patch with an
eye to a) Wikifying the entire thing (all nodes are WikiItems), and
b) having the namespace transparently extensible to non-Drupal items
(its just a set of string mapping functions between names and URLs),
and c) having the namespace transparent inter-Drupal in exactly the
same way InterWiki names work (except that I'll likely add an
XML/RPC post-change/notify layer).  Happily, implementing a unified
namespace does a lot to fix the worst navigation problems.  

  After that comes the rest of the TODO list, with the Wikifying
  project heading the list (which is just messy in the details).

Somewhere down the pipe is integrating Mailman.  Currently Drupal
will auth against its own local DB, another other Drupal it can
reach via XML/RPC, or against a JabberID.  Auth against LDAP and
against Delphi are just about to hit CVS along with an interesting
auth abstraction layer.  My hope is that once that transition is
done I can shove Mailman 2.5's auth and member configs under there
(likely via LDAP), as well as integrating Mailman with Jabber-based
discussion lists, MHonArc based web archives, web-based posting etc.
  
-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.