[Product-Developers] Plone + Mailing List Management?

[Rob LaRubbio]

I'm at the very early stages of evaluating integration of plone with sympa
and other mailing list managers.  (Jon Stahl at ONE/Northwest has put me up
to this).  I'm sending this email with three goals in mind, 1) send out our
initial thoughts, 2) See if any products or solutions currently exist and 3)
solicit feedback and recruit developers to help.

>From Jon's initial feature brainstorm I see two distinct feature sets which
could potentially be tied together.  I'll briefly call them External Control
and Group Collaboration.

External control is really nothing more than providing a UI in plone that
exposes email lists in an external MLM.  It allows users the ability to find
lists and manage their subscriptions.  It's features include:

  - Ability to discover lists from the server
  - Display information about each list (as defined and stored in the MLM)
  - Very basic list subscribe/unsubscribe
  - Ability to display users current subscription status

Group Collaboration is similar to Google and Yahoo groups, as well as the
og2mlm product for drupal (http://drupal.org/project/og2mlm).  It's feature
set includes:

  - A permissioned space within plone that registered site users can join
  - A mailing list associated with the group
  - Mirroring of the list with a threaded discussion within the space

Ideally I'm envisioning an architecture that is similar to getpaid where
there is the core product engine and then pluggable external mailing list
managers.  Sympa is currently the only planned MLM.

I see some similar products online, such as the nabble integration on
plone.org and listen over at openplans.org.  Listen looks close, but my
buildout is currently failling so I haven't played with it yet.

Does anyone have any thoughts, comments or suggestions?  I'd appreciate any
input or pointers.  Thanks

-Rob
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