Revision 21 as of 2010-06-08 13:50:55

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New Web Interface

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 integration Mailman 3 with the rest of your web site by accessing the REST admin interface.

For standalone systems, we want to develop and ship 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.

Here are some Web UI Mockups.

Here then are some guidelines, historical notes about previous attempts to update the Mailman WUI can be found here.

To make suggestions the developers should consider when creating and designing the UI, please visit this page.

The Mailman WUI will be developed on Launchpad, and discussions will be conducted on the mailman-developers mailing list.

Please add your name to this list if you are interested in helping out!

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

Exactly which templating system we'll choose is TBD. A couple of thoughts though:

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

  • Of course, written in Python :-)

Here's a table of templating system candidates:

Framework Pros Cons
Cheetah
The Django template system

Status

Status updates on the development can be found and discussed here.