[Mailman-Developers] Piping Mailman's HTML through PHP

[Ian Bicking]

John Price wrote:
> I'm far from a Python guru, so that's why I'm asking the
> developer's list.
> 
> I want to integrate the Mailman web pages into the rest
> of my web page, but everything else is PHP.  I've seen
> lots of posts about using PHP with Mailman, but not really
> any solutions (if I missed it, please point me in the
> right direction).
> 
> With that in mind, I thought I'd try to see how to do it
> myself.  All I really need Mailman to do is after it
> generates it's HTML to pipe the output through
> /usr/bin/php before sending it to stdout where apache will
> get it.
> 
> I have a solution, but I but there's a better way within
> Mailman.
> 
> Right now I moved all the programs in
> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin to
> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin.orig, then created shell
> scripts in cgi-bin that look like this:
> 
> --- start file: listinfo ---
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> ../cgi-bin.orig/listinfo | /usr/bin/php
> --- end file: listinfo ---
> 
> That's all there is to it.  Now I can add PHP directives
> in Mailman's HTML code, and they get parsed.
> 
> Is there a better way?

That seems pretty reasonable to me, though I've never though about it 
before.  At some point it should be possible in Apache 2 to use PHP as a 
filter, so that Apache will redirect the output of Mailman to PHP (with 
a little configuration to that effect, of course).  I believe using PHP 
as a filter is considered experimental now, but hopefully that use will 
mature.  This seems like the best long-term solution -- then your PHP is 
running in the same environment for Mailman as for your other pages.

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