[Mailman-Developers] Hi! I'll be your intern for the summer :)

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:01 PM -0400 2006-06-15, emf wrote:

>  I'm especially interested in getting any feedback, either on the wiki or
>  here, about any and all WebUI - or UI in general - ideas in people's
>  heads.

	Speaking only for myself, I think there should be three main design goals:

		1.  KISS -- I sometimes have to do list administration and
			moderation from my Treo 650, so anything that depends on
			graphics, JavaScript, CSS, or anything fancy is really bad
			news.  Stick to a pure text-only UI as much as possible,
			and try doing some actual tests with various PDAs and
			phones, as well as all common browsers (including Safari)
			on all common desktop platforms (including MacOS X).
			This also means that the size of the pages should be kept
			as reasonably small as possible -- the smaller they are,
			the faster they load.

			Of course, the standard exemplars are Google and Yahoo!

			IMO, we're doing pretty good in this area today, but I would
			hate to see all the current WebUI code get thrown out and
			replaced with a Web2.0 AJAX/.NET framework.

		2.  Functionality -- As much as possible, make it "just work"
			out-of-the-box.  We've managed to accumulate a lot of cruft
			in the FAQ Wizard because there are a whole host of things
			that list moderators and administrators want to do with their
			lists, and some of them are easy with the WebUI, and some
			are not -- while others simply aren't possible at all, at
			least not from the WebUI.

			Ideally, I'd like to see everything in the FAQ Wizard get
			removed because it is no longer applicable.  At the very
			least, for anything that is related to the UI, there should
			not be any entries to go into any FAQ, because it "just works".

		3.  Completeness -- diametrically opposed to #1 and #2 above,
			anything that can be done from the command-line should be
			do-able from the WebUI.  This includes things like editing
			posts in the archives, editing posts before approving them,
			etc....

			It's going to be tough to balance #3 against #1 and #2.
			There may be a lot of things that you would like to do
			in this area that would require support in other parts of
			the code, and therefore you may not be able to do them.
			But I would like to see a concerted effort made.

>          While the SoC project is fairly constrained, I want to at least
>  make the future easier.

	Your work is very important to us.

	I'm not sure you fully understand how important.  Or how difficult.  ;)

-- 
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

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.