[Mailman-Developers] Templating the interface

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Apr 27, 2007, at 4:53 PM, Aaron Crosman wrote:

> That said, I'm not clear where this project stands.  I've been  
> reviewed
> the summary from last summer's SoC work, and while that's given me  
> some
> idea of what was done, I don't have a good sense of how and where  
> to get
> started on helping.  Can you all offer some suggestions about what  
> I can
> do to be helpful and contribute?

I think the SoC work is interesting from an experimental standpoint,  
but we're probably going to have to re-do most of that work for  
inclusion in the trunk.

Because Mailman 2.1 is in stable maintenance release, we can't  
officially include any changes to its templating system.  Mailman  
trunk is where the work should be conducted, and I'm all for getting  
folks to help out with this effort.

There are several problems with MM2.1's web u/i, aside from the  
obvious creaky decade-old look, and css and xhtml-unfriendly style.   
The big problem is that there /is/ no one templating system.  Some of  
the web pages are generated from Python code, some are substituted in  
from the language-specific templates.  The problem with the latter is  
that every natural language has its own copy of the templates, so if  
you change the English version (say to add a widget), you've now  
broken all the other languages.

What I would really like to see is the adoption of one of the state- 
of-the-art Python-based templating systems, and converting the entire  
Mailman web u/i to use this system.  It's too early to mandate  
something, but Genshi <http://genshi.edgewall.org/> seems like the  
prime candiate.

I've personally tried ZPT and had lots of problems when I started to  
internationalize it.  I believe Ethan used Kid in the SoC branch  
initially and ran into problems there too.  He may have moved to  
Genshi toward the end of the project.  I know there are many other  
templating systems out there, such as PTL (from Quixote) but I don't  
have much experience with them.  I would encourage folks who have  
experience with templating systems to throw their hats in the ring  
here, or if you want to help out with this effort, go download some  
of these systems and try them out, and report back here.

We'll use http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/TemplatingNotes to keep  
track of this project.  I know Andrew Kuchling is quite interested in  
this project too, especially as it pertains to the archiver, since  
the next gen archiver will use the same templating system.

- -Barry

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