[Mailman-Developers] Web UI

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Jun 19, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

> A few days ago, a discussion of Mailman's web UI started on mailman- 
> users: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/msg49681.html
>
> Since this is more of a development effort than a users issue, we're  
> moving continued discussion here.

Thanks for doing so Terri!

> I'll kick off the thread by answering a question:
>
>> But how easy is it to actually improve the web UI?
>
> Not very.  Not only is it tightly integrated, but any text change  
> will have to go through all the many translators for various  
> languages.  And then there's accessibility concerns, issues  
> regarding any extra install requirements we might want to add (eg  
> for templating systems), and the basic problem of building an  
> interface that appeals to a rather large array of people... Changing  
> the web UI is a big pain.
>
> That said, I think this is a worthwhile endeavour, and we had  
> previous discussed an improved web UI being a good goal for a 2.2  
> release (we'll also need new UI for mm3, of course).  Just don't  
> expect it to happen tomorrow or be a cakewalk.  This is not a  
> project to take on lightly.

All great points.

A couple of comments.  First, we're /somehow/ going to ease the  
translator problem.  This won't eliminate the problem, but I hope by  
bring up a Pootle server or adopting a FLOSS translation service we'll  
make it easier to get our interfaces translated.

Second, architecturally I really want to split the u/i so that it's  
not so tightly integrated.  Maki and Andrew are working on a  
privileged REST api to Mailman for controlling it in 2.2 and 3.0.  It  
is against this REST api that we should write the u/i, and it's my  
hope that we can design this API to be quite similar between the two  
branches.

> I've started up a wiki page here for us to capture ideas for an  
> improved web UI:
>
> http://wiki.list.org/x/RoBE
>
>
> and being the self-interested person that I am, I'm going to try to  
> generate some thoughts on my own idea here first ;)
>
> I think we could benefit a fair bit from having a "simple" and an  
> "expert" interface for the list administrators.  I had a number of  
> replies both on and off list saying "yes!  please!" so I take it I'm  
> not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.

Here's my +1 :)
- -Barry

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