[consulting] the Ultimate forum based Malinglist Manager

[Robert Castelo]

Ber, the reason there is no one unified effort on this is that there 
are fundamentally different approaches to creating a solution, each one 
has their pros and cons, and people are working on the approach they 
think is best.

The main division is about whether we should create a 100% Drupal 
native solution, or integrate an existing mail application with Drupal. 
It's the same argument as whether to focus on integrating PHPBB with 
Drupal or to spend time improving the Drupal forum module.

Integrating with an existing application has advantages:

* it may be a tried and tested mature application
* extensive features

Disadvantages:

* it's features may not integrate well with Drupal and contributed 
modules
* maintenance is expensive as the module connecting the applications 
needs to be kept updated for both of them.

I'm in favour of creating a 100% Drupal solution, it may initially lack 
some of the features of the stand alone applications, but because it's 
built with Drupal APIs it will have many other features that the stand 
alone applications will never have.

Also, as we're talking about Open Source code, we can look at how other 
applications handle tasks and use their solutions to create our own 
within Drupal, instead of bolting on the whole application we can just 
use the best bits of it.

Even within the group of people who think a 100% Drupal solution would 
be best, there's disagreement on how that should be implemented:

a. as one large monolithic module

b. as a set of libraries, each handling specific tasks, which other 
module(s) can use

I prefer the libraries solution.

Having one monolithic module has a big advantage that it makes 
installation easier than the libraries approach, but a monolithic 
module will never do everything that everyone wants, resulting in 
developers each creating their own solution from scratch and a lot of 
duplication.

By creating libraries that handle common tasks, developers can 
concentrate on the extra 2 or 3 features that makes their mail module 
different from the others.

I'm in favour of discussing this topic, but I don't think we're going 
to get agreement on which is the best approach and have everyone 
working on one solution. This really is a case of talk is silver code 
is gold, as developers, sponsors and users will make the decision of 
which approach is working best for them and vote with their time and 
wallets.

Anyone who is interested in the 100% Drupal solution using libraries 
approach can check out my work on the eNewsletter module and the 
libraries that where developed for it:

http://drupal.org/project/enewsletter

Documentation, development, and sponsorship information:

http://www.cortextcommunications.com/development/newsletter/features


Best regards,

Robert Castelo
Services Manager
Cortext Communications

http://www.cortextcommunications.com

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8746 0117
Fax: +44 (0) 20 8248 9565

49 Greenside Road
London W12 9JQ
United Kingdom