Developers of Sympa

[Mark Valiukas <address@concealed>]

(thread moved from sympa-users at Olivier's suggestion)

Olivier Salaun - CRU wrote:

> Here are a few comments on your work :
>
>   1. Since your summary includes both text/plain and text/html parts,
>      we think it should become the default summary format. It means
>      that you shouldn't have to add an extra reception_mode (there are
>      too many of them) and you don't have to manage extra
>      @tabrcpthtmlsummary

I had thought about that. The reason I thought an extra delivery type
was warranted was that I didn't want to break existing functionality.
With a single summary delivery type, if a listmaster uses the
html template then there is no option for recipients to get a
text-only summary. It's not important to most of my users, but I
think some people may be upset about having multipart/alternate
messages forced on them.

I'll probably keep both a summary and a html_summary delivery
type on my development box for the foreseeable future though,
as to me it makes sense to have both while testing - whether I
get nothing, one or both summary formats gives me an idea of
where I've broken something :-) I'll leave it up to the developers
and the community as to whether an extra delivery type should
be included - I think it's pretty obvious where I stand on this,
but I appreciate that too many options can just confuse users and
administrators.



>   2. You should define a subroutine that htmlizes variables ('&'
>      changed to '&'...)

I think an extra sub in tools.pl would be an appropriate place,
if you have no objections.

Hopefully in the next few days I'll have something a little
more final to submit, after some clean-up and alterations.


The people who asked for this functionality want even more.
The next stage I'm working on is categorisation of messages
based on moderation and/or keywords in the subject line.

This is so people will need to read even less of the summary
in order to get the information they need - e.g. people could
skip past an "Acting Appointments" section, and focus on a 
"Lectures and Seminars" section. What has been asked for is
a mini-newsletter, in essence, with community input and
automatic categorisation which can be overridden by a
moderator.

This is aiming towards a summary format somewhat along the lines of:

Message Category 1
        (links to category 1 messages)
Message Category 2
        (links category 2 messages)
Miscellaneous Messages
        (links to uncategorised messages)

Important points on this:
-  categorisation will only occur if the list is a categorised one
-  categorisation will occur automatically based on keywords in
the subject line, and/or moderator input (will require wwsympa and
mail command alterations)
-  an extra message header will be inserted to define the category
-  Extra hashes will be populated by the digest processing stuff,
and passed with $param. These will identify which categories will be
used in a particular summary, and which messages belong in each
category.

I see the logic in the template looking something like:

while (another category to process)
   show message category
   for (messages)
       if message belongs to category
           show message details
        fi
   next message
end while


Has anyone looked at doing anything like this in the past?
As far as I can tell, it can be built on top of what's
there already, and need not break any current functionality.



--
Mark Valiukas