[Mailman-Developers] Alternate user (and admin) interfaces

[Ian Bicking]

I've been searching around for people's experiences implementing 
alternate web interfaces for Mailman, but I've been surprised not to 
find much.

The desire to do this seems obvious to me -- there's a lot of different 
flavors of mailing list (discussion, announce, correspondance 
management, and many others).  The interface tries to support all of 
these, and is rather overwhelming as a result.  Since I haven't found 
other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) I'm not looking 
in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not sharing their 
results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to ask public 
questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up quickly, (e) or 
it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of prototypes but nothing 
serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination or interest to try.

Now that I list them, (a) seems the most likely, but I swear I've really 
tried to find them.  Are their examples people might suggest?

Right now I'm just trying to evaluate the feasibility of creating a 
trimmed-down interface.  Actually a couple interfaces: one for announce 
list subscribers (*very* minimal), another for announce list 
administrators (including some posting tools and reports), and another 
simplified discussion list user interface.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if other people are thinking about this, 
have already done this, or can give any advise.  It doesn't look hard 
from my first investigation, but I'm also not sure how to best implement 
-- Mailman's web interface confuses me a bit, and I'm guessing that it's 
an ad hoc application server.  If we go ahead to make this, I suspect 
we'll want to do something more expedient (i.e., not based on Mailman 
3.0), but it would be nice to do this in a way that can be shared, and 
something that isn't just a hack.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org