Development Plan

Hello everyone,

I think it is time for me to put out a development plan that is basically a 
response of all the opinions I gathered from all the mails I got. I hope 
this will be a decent compromise for all of you:

0. Everyone should get Mailman installed as a Zope Product and apply my 
couple of files to get the proof of concept running. Please let me know, if 
you have troubles with that.

1. There will be no fork, since forks are bad. I would like to develop an 
extension of Mailman in the form of a Zope Product. This way we can use all 
the programming power of the Mailman development and they can utilize ours.

2. I think it will be best to develop it for Zope 2.5 on Python 2.1. The 
reason is that most people already switched over and updated their products 
to work with Zope 2.4+ and got used to use the new features in 2.1+. If you 
have issues of how to run Zope 2.3.x- and Zope 2.4+ on the same server, I 
would be glad to help you.

3. First I plan to integrate the data structures, since this will save us 
from rewriting the management screens. At the moment the storage is not 
handled very flexible in Mailman, but we could implement a Storage API and 
implement the current way of doing it and then one for the ZODB. Can anyone 
get a hold of or make some UML diagrams of the current structure? I am 
looking for designs of MailmanFolder, MailList, User, 
MessageFolder/Message. I would prefer, if you use ObjectDomain, which has a 
free demo.

4. Then we will try to get the management screens translated. I decided to 
go with ZPT from the beginning, especially since we are developing on Zope 
2.5, which natively ships with ZPT now. This will be a major task, but it 
will be fun, since we can create this part as flexible as we like. :-) 
Trevor, this could be all yours!

5. Make nice distributions, so that one has to only install Zope and 
Mailman will be also compiled as well. Just imagine, how cool that would 
be! I think we should also work on a Windows distro.

However, I really count on support of others, be it via financial 
compensation or programming hours. I do not want to end up developing it by 
myself as a one man show. I will develop as much as time permits (with a 
contract I would have a version for IPC10) and help with particular tricky 
tasks.

Okay, so let's do it!

Regards,
Stephan

--
Stephan Richter
CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student
Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management