[Mailman-Users] Per Virtual domain customizations

[John Locke]

Hello,

I've been using Mailman for a while now for a single, low-traffic,
low-membership list. I'm now launching a service that's going to use
mailman for quite a few more low-traffic, low-membership lists, and I'm
trying to set up some customizations for the membership and
administrative interfaces. This is going to be fairly tightly integrated
with a web site that uses a MySQL database to store a bunch of
membership information. So now I've done a bit of digging, and figured
out how to modify the templates and mailing list defaults, but there's 
a couple of things I'm still trying to figure out:

1. I've seen some references to a way of managing users in a SQL
database. Is this implemented yet? I haven't been able to find anything
explaining how to go about doing it. Since my users are already going to
have an entry in a SQL database, I thought it would be great to combine
the site password for a user with the mailman password, and make the
whole thing less confusing.

2. I can't figure out how to get default text that uses a variable into
the list at creation time. I'd like the description to have a specific
short sentence that includes the %(real_name)s variable, but I don't
know much about Python, and it doesn't seem to work. Can I put this
variable in the description text, and have it expand correctly?


I have a few other ideas for web sites that might use different default
configurations of Mailman. So here's a few questions related to this: 

3. Can you customize default information/templates for a single virtual
domain? It appears that changing the Mailman/templates/* affects the
entire site. Is there a way to have different default templates, based
on the virtual host? Probably simpler--what Python syntax would I use to
add custom default variables to the mm_cfg.py file, and where would I
start to dig to find where the templates are loaded, so I could hack in
some conditional path changes?

4. I'm confused about the ADMIN_CATEGORIES variable. I redefined it in
mm_cfg.py (to remove some of the categories for list admins--I'm trying
to make this whole thing very simple for my users), and it changed the
menu site-wide. I'm thinking, if I knew the basic conditional construct
for Python, I could just redefine it for specific domains. Is there any
function set up to do this already, or something else I should consider
before doing so?

Guess I'm answering some of my own questions here. I know nothing about
Python--maybe I'll go read up on it a bit first. But if somebody could
give me an answer for #1, I'd appreciate it, and if there's any short
cuts I should look at for the others, it'd be great!

I do have virtual domains working just fine, otherwise...

Thanks,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com
Just launched: http://teamcheckin.com



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