The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

The subscriber custom_attributes in Sympa are a very useful and powerful capability; however. I think their utility is somewhat lessened by their always being visible and editable by the subscriber in question.

 

To this end, I propose an improvement to Sympa allowing custom_attributes to be set to ‘hidden’ and ‘readonly’ in addition to the existing ‘optional’ and ‘required’ settings.

 

-           The ‘hidden’ option would hide these options from all but listmaster and admins with subscriber maintenance privileges.

-          The ‘readonly’ option would allow subscribers to view their setting, but not to change it themselves.

 

This seems a fairly simple patch, which is available here: http://steveshipway.org/software/f_sympa.html

I have included a normal context diff, plus the modified files in a tarball

 

The only changes are

-          Adding the options in ListDef.pm

-          Concealing/making readonly in edit_attributes.tt2

-          Concealing in subscriber_table.tt2

 

Benefits of this would be

-          Admins can store per-subscriber notes they do not want the subscriber to be aware of

-          The custom_attributes could hold (eg) moderation flags, that should not be editable by the subscriber

-          Fields loaded from external ldap/sql sources could be set to readonly to prevent modification

 

Further improvments that I have not addressed would be

-          Add a default setting to custom_attributes so that they could be set automatically at subscription time (possibly using TT2)

-          It may be necessary to test to enforce the ‘readonly’ in case of people trying to get around it

-          Custom fields should also be inherited by child lists when using  list_include (does this already happen?)

 

Discussion and feedback welcome.  Sympa 6.2 is a bit of a moving target at the moment for patches and so please be careful applying to anything but 6.2.4

 

Steve

 

Steve Shipway

Unix Design Team Lead

The University of Auckland

T: +64 9 3737 599 ext 86487

E: address@concealed

(GNU Terry Pratchett)

 

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