[Mailman-Developers] Fwd: Volunteer sought to code Mailman/Plesk integration script for use by African organizations

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:18 PM -0500 2005-02-07, Tobias Eigen wrote:

>  As regards your two faq questions -
>
>>  	It's funny.  A totally different question regarding integration
>>  between Mailman and Plesk finally lead me to create FAQ 6.15 at
>>  <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq06.015.htp>.
>
>  This FAQ I think is still perfectly adequate, except perhaps you may
>  want to refer people to the Plesk Forum at http://forum.sw-soft.com/
>  for help.

	Done.

>  Any version of Plesk higher than Plesk 7 comes with an older version
>  of Mailman installed, and enables Plesk clients to add/remove mailman
>  lists through their control panel. This is nifty, but does not come
>  with the benefits of newer versions of Mailman, and because it seems
>  so simple it trips alot of people up since it encourages them to set
>  up Mailman lists when really they probably only need something simpler.
>
>  It is possible to trick Plesk into recognizing newer versions
>  installed manually but it's not for the faint of heart.

	Hmm.  This is a good note to include in the FAQ entry.

	I hope you don't mind if I use it, but would you like this quote 
to be attributed to you by name?  I didn't do that initially, because 
I feared you might get inundated with e-mail questions from other 
people, and I don't want to put you in that kind of a position unless 
you're willing to take that risk.

>>  	Of course, when you're talking about simulating the functionality
>>  of Yahoo!Groups, there's also FAQ 1.26 at
>>  <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.026.htp>.
>
>  I think this FAQ needs to be updated. I would not recommend m2f which
>  has been stuck at beta for a very long time and seems to be going
>  nowhere fast.

	Will do.

>  Love the dedication of those guys but really it seems they've bitten
>  off more than they can chew. A successful forum/list integration is
>  done over at the unfortunately named FUDFORUM -
>  http://www.fudforum.org. We use it very actively for two discussion
>  lists and it has perfect bidirectional communication between the
>  Mailman lists and forums. I am incredibly impressed by what the
>  single developer of FUD has been able to achieve with this forum.

	Is this stuff publicly available?  Should we refer people to it?

>  For what it's worth, and for the record: for a few years now, to no
>  avail so far, I've been probing the community forums for various
>  promising forums about mailing list/forum/CMS integration:
>
>  FUD Forum: http://www.fudforum.org
>  PHPBB: http://www.phpbb.com
>  M2F for phpbb: http://m2f.sourceforge.net
>  Simple Machines Forum: http://www.simplemachines.org
>  Mambo Simpleboard: http://tsmf.jigsnet.com/

	Of these, we know that you like FUD Forum, and m2f leaves much to 
be desired.  Do any of the others provide any integration features 
with Mailman?

>  Well, I think I addressed this above in part - the problem really
>  is that Plesk makes it very easy to do alot of very powerful things.
>  Like with the mysql databases you can set up, for example, people
>  have an expectation that Mailman will be turnkey, which it really is
>  not. I'm not sure it ever should be, though I do think (as I
>  discussed above too) it would be helpful to have an easier frontend
>  for subscribers and even for basic moderator functions. This would
>  make Mailman more ready for wide adoption, even by regular everyday
>  people who just want to set up a newsletter or discussion group and
>  aren't interested in the technical aspects.

	I agree that we can (and should) make Mailman easier to use and 
administrate.  Of course, that has to be balanced with the desire to 
have additional features, usually coming from the more advanced sites 
and programmers.  I wouldn't want to create a fork of Mailman, but it 
would be nice if we could find some way to combine both ease-of-use 
and power features.

	Of course, others can always disagree with the balance that we 
try to strike, but it would be nice if we could get their help in 
trying to fix those issues from within Mailman, as opposed to having 
them take what we've got and then add their own tools to munge it 
beyond recognition.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.