[Mailman-Users] integrating Mailman and slash?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 9:10 AM -0500 10/16/00, Christopher Kolar wrote:
>I recently received a questions from a person who is running a 
>slash-based  site and who is interested in integrating Mailman into 
>their site.



>>I run a slash engine and want to intergrate the layout of my slash site
>>with the mailman. So in slash I can use the <!-- include virtual
>>.. directive to specify an include file. The files are of the type
>>shtml. My question is if there is any way to make those include files
>>work with mailman....


The answer is ... no, not officially, and it sort  of depends.

Couple of issues here.. First, Mailman 2.0 doesn't support adding a 
UI to it. So officially, you can't wrap it with a look and feel. 
There is, however, a patch you can add to Mailman to do this, which 
adds a global header and footer to all Mailman generated pages. Look 
on Sourceforge in the "deferred" patches section. It works fine (my 
sites I'm almost-bloody-done-punch-list-is-four-bloody-items working 
on use it. I'd show you, but they're not bloody done).

Second issue is that SSI (the .shtml stuff) doesn't support the 
output of CGIs, and so you can't wrap CGI output with SSI commands. 
I'm pretty sure, however, there are tweaks or modules to resolve 
that, or you can do what I did, which is just embed the header and 
footer in the Mailman mm_cgi.py. that means if you update your 
header/footer you have to update mailman as well, but that shouldn't 
be a huge problem for most sites (or maybe some enterprising person 
will update that sourceforge patch to recognize a file inclusion...)

So officially, Mailman doesn't support this. But it can be done, 
unless your header/footer are very dynamic. And even then, with a 
little work, you could even make that work. but it's all unsupported 
patches that hopefully will be part of things post-2.0.

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui at plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq at apple.com)

Be just, and fear not.