Developers of Sympa

[Sarah Kerr <address@concealed>]

Hi Sympa Dev,

I would like to let you know about a project we are undertaking and ask
for any ideas you may have regarding a current challenge we are facing.

Project:
--------
We are creating a free software replacement for http://www.dgroups.org
which is a 'yahoo groups' like equivalent but for the international
development community (without advertising and funded by international
development institutions).  What we hope to do is pair together the
Drupal CMS with Sympa in order to achieve the Dgroups functionality.

Sympa was chosen as our MLM of choice because it has interfaces in place
in order for external application to interact with it. Namely its SOAP
server is one of its attractive features.

The project is dependent on extending the SOAP work which Serge is
undertaking.

If you are interested to learn more, the following blog entry gives more
details:
http://blogs.bellanet.org/index.php?/archives/168-FLOSS-Dgroups-What-is-happening.html

Challenge:
----------
Deciding how to best synchronize mutual data between Drupal and Sympa is
starting to become a challenge specifically to display/retrieve message
data in Drupal.  We would like to display a list of messages and be able
to display the actual message (similar to viewing messages through WWSympa).

Choices considered:

1.  Store message data in a database and retrieve this information as
needed.  It was suggested that the messages database should be stored in
Drupal rather than Sympa (with a script added in Sympa to place message
data into the drupal message database).

2.  Mhonarc was considered but proved to be limiting - it generates html
pages from mail archives, but this (html pages of data) is not a useful
data format for Drupal.

3.  Using a tool such as dbmail (http://www.dbmail.org/) which enables
mail message storage and retrieval - it would act almost as an
intermediary between Sympa and Drupal.

Is message storage in a database our best option?  Has anyone else
experienced the need to 'integrate' Sympa message data into a CMS /
external tool?  What would you recommend from your experiences?

Any help would be welcome!
SK
-- 
Sarah Kerr
Bellanet, IDRC - www.idrc.ca  blogs.bellanet.org
+1 613 236 6163 x2192 - skype/gizmo: sarahkerr