New Web Interface (Postorius)

Postorius is the main component of the administrative interface of Mailman 3. It is an application based on the Django framework and is currently in beta. The project is hosted on Launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/postorius

Postorius depends on mailman.client, the Python bindings to Mailman's REST interface:

https://launchpad.net/mailman.client

Design rationale

Mailman 3 comes with a new architecture which allows for a separation between the web user interface (WUI) and the mailing list engine. In fact, you can run Mailman 3 with no WUI at all, or integrate Mailman 3 with the rest of your web site by accessing the REST admin interface via mailman.client.

For standalone systems, we are developing and shipping our own updated WUI. The original Mailman 2 user interface was designed in the late 1990's so it's clearly dated, and the technology backing it is ancient, inflexible and non-standard. Today, there are tons of great Python-based web frameworks, and of course JavaScript is all the rage today. We want a modern, good looking, well-organized WUI that can be used with Mailman 3 but is optional for those sites that want to heavily customize their use of Mailman. Thus: Postorius!

Guidelines

1. Modern, easy to use web user interface for users, list admins, and site admins.

2. Progressive enhancement; i.e. can use JavaScript for dynamic aspects, but must remain usable for non-JavaScript browsers, and must be friendly to screen readers.

3. WUI templates must support internationalization by allowing us to mark up translatable texts for inclusion in the gettext catalog. Technology must integrate with Python's gettext module and/or Mailman's i18n infrastructure.

4. WUI template system must be Python-based (framework TBD) and GPLv3 compatible.

5. JavaScript library must be GPLv3 compatible (framework TBD).

Templating systems

We chose the Django templating system. Some thoughts we were considering:

• It would be nice to use the same templating system in the WUI and core engine. I'd like to be able to use templates for all email that Mailman sends

• It should be friendly to Internationalization. Meaning it should be possible to extract texts from templates and add them to a gettext catalog.

• Of course, written in Python

Developing Postorius

The Mailman WUI (a.k.a. Postorius) is developed on Launchpad (code, code review, and bug reports), and we discuss it on the mailman-developers mailing list. Please also see the bottom of the page for more resources (including mockups, feature suggestions, and prior work).

A quick 5 minute guide (if you're lucky) to get Postorius installed for development can be found here:

A 5 minute guide to get the Mailman web UI running

A guide to run Postorius using Apache is part of the Postorius documentation:

http://packages.python.org/postorius/setup.html

Some preliminary notes on testing new code in Postorius (this is still a draft...):

http://packages.python.org/postorius/development.html

Please add your name to this list, and email the mailman-developers list, if you are interested in helping out!

• Barry Warsaw

• Patrick Ben Koetter

• terri

• Anna Granudd

• Florian Fuchs

• Claudia Fleiner

• benste

• Toshio Kuratomi
• Sumana Harihareswara

Wish List / Random Ideas

• "moderate_all" option for admins: "Consider an admin that is reviewing a bunch of bounces/spam, etc. It might be handy for him to have some buttons to freeze the list (eg. moderate-all) in that context without having to navigate over to a different section to set that flag." (wacky via irc)
• showing the Log in the WUI (C Nulk via Mailinglist)
• allowing a user 'to be on vacation' (wacky via IRC)

More resources

• A 5 minute guide to get the Mailman web UI running

• How to get Postorius running on Apache and mod_wsgi

• mailman3 in virtualenv

• Design work and Web UI Mockups

• Views that Mailman 3 should support

• Requirements, such as accessibility

• New Menu Structure_Layout

• Previous work on UI

• Suggestions for new Mailman 3.0 UI (old)

• Old status updates