Developers of Sympa

[address@concealed]

Hi Sarah

Please report all usefull information to the drupal-dgroup (if any).


Sarah Kerr wrote:

> 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.
>  
That's a wonderfull idea.  We  are really interested to hear from you :

   * how do drupal and sympa share the authentication ?
   * what about authorization ?
   * do plans to use sympa web interface or hide it ? If so do you
     plans to merge some features from drupal and from sympa into
     unified html pages ?
   * ...

> 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.
>  
Thoses features are ready now (list creation, list deletion, review and 
add) , they will be part of version 5.3 (we will prepare a tar.gz 
probably number 5.3a9 in after this version as been tested on our 
production server).

> 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).
>  
We can suggest you option 1) The way to do is to add some new parameters 
in Sympa to control the archived deamon. This deamon add or remove 
messages in Sympa archive. What we could do is to allow any external 
application as a plugin to archived. Such plugin could have 2 features : 
add a new message to the external archive, remove a message from the 
external archive.
This solution  would not change Sympa archives for thoses not using your 
product. Archives will be duplicated but it will be easy to maintain 
consistency for the 2 versions of archive (excepted for authorization).
This solution is the faster to implement and keep each product (Sympa 
and Drupal) development project really independant.

> 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.
>  
Yes, we agree this is not a good solution : mhonarc is a really nice 
engine to show message folders as html pages but it does not provide any 
API to access to the messages. Inside Sympa itself, we keep the original 
SMTP version of messages because we don't want to store only the  HTML  
representation of messages

> 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.
>  
dbmail seems nice but we don't want to make it mandatory for Sympa users.

We will do our best to ease your job : if you plans any modification in 
Sympa, please discuss it with us we will accept it as contribs.  Please 
use Sympa bug/features request tool in order to describe your needs.