[Mailman-Users] NEWBIE Seeking Reference Materials/Developers

[Drew Tenenholz]

Dear List --

I hope you can help me find books, reading materials, and possibly 
developers in my area that can help me customize Mailman for one of 
my clients.  I previously posted to one of the language specific 
Mailman lists, but got no replies.

If you have the time to read the details below and can recommend ways 
to get started using Mailman/Python, I would greatly appreciate it. 
If not, what is the 'best' way to look for Mailman resources?

Sincerely,
Drew Tenenholz
Database Designer/Web Administrator
International Society for Infectious Diseases

The situation:
I am a FileMaker Pro developer in the Boston area.
My client is the International Society for Infectious Diseases 
<http://www.isid.org> and I have become their de facto IT department.
Prior to my arrival, they were running a collection of carefully 
moderated mailing lists with majordomo on a Sun 250 machine (Solaris 
8)  <http://www.promedmail.org> with about 32,000 subscribers.  They 
still do so today.
They have purchased a Mac OS XServe (dual 1.25GHz), running OS X 10.3 
(Panther), Apache 1.3 and Mailman 2.1.4 and want to take advantage of 
the pre-installed Mailman

What is needed:
How can we adapt the public subscription pages to limit user's options?

Although Mailman provides a wealth of options, our users truly need 
less.  Right now, most of them know nothing more than 
subscribe/unsubscribe via email, and we employ customized web pages 
that issue email-based commands on their behalf.

One major reason for switching to Mailman was the 
internationalization support.  We are now running one list which 
should be sending almost exclusively Cyrillic posts (Russian).

What is required to insure postings appear in Cyrillic text?  Will 
they be UNICODE or HTML/charset encoded?  (i.e. How will the Oracle 
9i system handle the posts, assuming that it gets them at all?  We 
want to be able to search that database in Cyrillic after all.)

Our UNIX/Perl programmer has already modified the message headers to 
include a necessary custom header to integrate with an Oracle 
database archiving system for searching and displaying posts.

Has this been done 'correctly'?

Is it possible to create our own customized subscription pages that 
issue the required Python commands AND some additional 
FileMaker/Lasso/XML commands to update the subscriber database used 
by the office staff?

We need to gather more information than simply an email address.  We 
ask list members for contributions and use aggregate statistics in 
grant proposals, so email addresses alone are not sufficient.  If 
there is a seamless way to integrate the systems, that would be 
preferable.