3.40. I want to completely customize the look and feel of Mailman – how do I do that?

See also How do I hide the fact that I'm using a mailing list management system? and I want to do extensive customization of outgoing messages -- can Mailman do this?.

Mailman gives the administrator a limited degree of control over the "look and feel" of the user interface, by allowing you to edit the HTML templates of certain web pages. However, some other parts are generated internally, and short of changing the Python source code, you have no control over what those pages will look like.

There is no site-wide header or footer that can be modified, nor is there any way to remove the trailer at the bottom which includes a link to the admin interface. There are also no facilities to use CSS, or to incorporate Mailman output within a frames-based page layout for your site.

If you'd like to add these kinds of features to Mailman, we encourage you to join the mailman-developers mailing list and work with us to add this kind of functionality. To quote Richard Barrett on a related subject:

 MM is free, Open Software; so go for it. I am sure a well implemented enhancement
 will find other grateful users.

See also the thread on the mailman-users mailing list at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-August/038609.html.

Note: There was a Google "Summer of Code" project underway to help clean up the User Interface (UI) for Mailman, and the result of this project may be to help clear up a lot of confusion related to this topic, and help people get closer to the kinds of things they're looking for out of Mailman. See Summer Of Code; for more information.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.