Anyone interested in cosponsoring work on a tighter integration of Plone and Mailman?

[Jon Stahl]

Sisi, Ben, et al--

We here at ONE/Northwest have a big Sympa install (over 1000 lists, and 
200,000 users!), and so we'd be quite interested in Sympa integration.  
We're not big Sympa experts, but we're pretty handy with the Plone. ;-)  

We have a very strong relationship with the crew at ElectricEmbers.net, 
who are a progressive hosting firm in the Bay Area who specialize in 
high-touch NGO email stuff, and are probably the most knowledgeable 
folks in the NGO sector about Sympa (except for maybe the Riseup 
folks!).  Not sure if that's relevant (yet).

best,
jon


sisi wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Carsten Senger wrote:
>> Hi Ben,
>>
>> Ben Rudder wrote:
>
>> A little off topic because we have no ressources to cosponser 
>> integration. But we, a very small umemployed ngo, had the same 
>> problems some time ago. I skimmed trough the sources of Mailman 2 and 
>> did some research about approaches to extend Mailman 2. Hacking 
>> Mailman 2 is undesireable and was out of question to us, so we opted 
>> for the manual approach.
>>
>> Our biggest win since then was migrating to Sympa. 
>> (http://www.sympa.org). It's a mailinglist server written in Perl.
>
> I'm glad someone else brought Sympa up!
>
> There have already been discussions about integrating Sympa with 
> Plone, as a replacement for listen (because indeed using the zope/ 
> plone stack to handle mailing lists for large lists and heavy traffic 
> is not a good idea). I don't want to go over the reasons why Sympa 
> rather than mailman cause that is covered by Carsten below.
>
> I did want to say though, that this is something Friends of the Earth 
> International and Friends of the Earth Netherlands desperatly need, 
> and I was planning on drumming up support for a sprint to get some 
> developers together to work on this in the new year. We can't offer 
> money but we can offer space and logistics for the sprint (in 
> amsterdam!) and I am hoping FoE Netherlands will be able to provide 
> some programming skills too.
>
> In the International office we are still using mailman, but I'd like 
> to migrate to Sympa for alot of reasons. No idea what the migration 
> path is like but perhaps that's something we could work on together if 
> you find Sympa interesting too (Carsten I'd appreciate any tips you 
> have but it's a bit off topic so maybe off list?)
>
> I believe the Sympa community have already been approached about 
> integration with Plone and were happy with it, but I might have that 
> wrong.
>
> I'm open to the integration being with mailman if that is the majority 
> wish, and would be still like to help organise a sprint if so, but 
> perhaps we can discuss which mailing list software to integrate with 
> first and make a decision as a community?
>
> I think the plone community as a whole would back this, not just in 
> the NGO world, so maybe we need to move this discussion over to the 
> third party products list (but not till I've joined that list!!) :-)
>
> Cheers,
> and thanks to Ben for bringing this up, I hope we can work together 
> soon :-)
> sisi
>
>> If you do some research you should consider migrating to and 
>> integrating Sympa. And it would be a far more flexible solution for 
>> the community.
>>
>> We chose it because
>> - it's mature and is constandly being developed
>> - has a serverwide userdb
>> - can authenticate against different sources (cas, shibboleth and ldap)
>> - has an advances permission and rule system (authentication scenarios)
>> - templates for different list types (List Families)
>> - true virtual hosts were you can use the same listname in different
>>   hosts.
>> - a SOAP interface
>> - RSS-Feeds
>> - good documentation
>>
>> cons for us where:
>> - setup and integration into postfix with virtual domains can be a
>>   little tricker
>> - flexible bounce-management (and in general more options) that we had
>>   to consider
>> - UI could be more intuitive
>> - perl
>> - less known and a smaller userbase
>>
>> ..carsten
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> NGO mailing list
>> NGO at lists.plone.org
>> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
>