[Mailman-Users] follow up on adding fields to general listinformation page

[John W. Baxter]

On 12/9/2004 17:45, "Mark Sapiro" <msapiro at value.net> wrote:

> brad wrote:
>> 
>> But here is the key:
>> 
>> *** I don't want to just customize the look and feel of the page, I want
>> data that the users enter into new "title" and "company" fields be entered
>> and accessible in the Mailman database so that we can at least try to verify
>> that people who join the list are not competitors, and are truly our
>> customers.
>> 
>> In other words I want to add two fields to the <MM-Subscribe-Box> part of
>> the "General list information page". That page already has
>> <MM-Subscribe-Box> and a <mm-fullname-box> fields, I would like to somehow
>> add a <mm-jobtitle-box> and a <mm-company-box> and be able to access the
>> data that the customers enter for those field later on.
>> 
>> I guess the easiest way to do this would be for the customers to add text on
>> the page "Please put your name, title, and company in this field) above the
>> "name" <mm-fullname-box>, and then they would submit this data for the email
>> and name fields:
>> 
>> email at mail.com
>> John Doe, President, ABC Corp
>> 
>> But my boss would prefer not doing it that way. I am sure this is probably
>> possible modifying the python code, but I am looking for an easy way, if
>> possible, of doing this.
> 
> You could certainly modify the subscribe form to add the two additional
> fields. You wouldn't necessarily have to define <mm-jobtitle-box> and
> <mm-company-box> to do this. You could just add the HTML for the
> fields directly to the edited template.
> 
> But either way, what next? You have to modify the processing of the
> form to accept and validate these fields and store these values in
> newly defined attributes in the member database (stock database is
> included with list configuration in the list's config.pck pickle).
> You'd also have to deal with collecting the data in these fields via
> other subscription methods such as e-mail. It looks to me like changes
> to several pieces of Mailman would be involved.
> 
> And we haven't even addressed what you're going to do with this
> information.

To me, it feels as if Brad is more interested in Customer Relations Manager
software than in mailing list software (one does want to know the title and
company when sending CRM-type messages, as in Brad's example above).


Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
Articles 3.18, 3.37 (found by searching for Relations--there might be more
in there for other searches)

  --John