pyjamas lamson replacement for google groups
Pyjamas and Lamson Mailing list viewer and poster
as part of the "eat dogfood" mantra, and the lovely lamson mailing list software having been chosen, i did an archive viewer a couple of days ago, which used the json-formatted archive created by lamson, because that's far easier to pick up (and less cpu-intensive) and turn into python than a Maildir.
what was missing was the means to post messages.
so, in order to do that, i've had to add openid support to the pyjamas app. then, having got that to work, it was no good on its own so i had to add a way for lamson to send out "is this person who they claim to be" messages, by which the openid could be associated with the email address.
haven't added that into the GUI yet - have to add a "preferences" box. hmm…
anyway: that was quite a lot of fun, working out how to create a state machine in lamson. it took me hours to work out what was going on, but i now should also be able to turn lamson into a "proper" email service, by supporting simple relaying of postmaster@pyjs.org and so on to me, which lamson *doesn't* do on its own.
but then, the next step is to allow posting of messages. that proved also challenging: in the end i chose to use the lamson.server.Relay, connecting over 127.0.0.1 and faking up the "From" and "To".
there's still quite a bit to do, but once it gets to the "useable" state i'm simply going to chop pyjamas-dev googlegroups.com off at the knees. i'll add a reply button, i'll make sure there's a "compose" button… and… errr… attachments? nope. viewing attachments? nope. showing message "reply" threads? nnnope. well, ok, maybe. might have to see how that goes, see if it's easy to do.
about the only thing i migggght see if i can do is to add support for google oauth / openid, because most of the users duh being on googlegroups use google for authentication duh.
but - again, have to see how it goes: once a certain aaabsolute minimum threshold of functionality is achieved, it's bye bye google groups, and one less web site being used which is _not_ a pyjamas application goes out the window.
Syndicated 2010-07-03 22:46:46 from blog/lkcl