[Systers-dev] Time for weekly updates

[Yian Shang]

Hi everyone!

Update this week is on my blog again (or see below):
http://movicont.nfshost.com/blog/mailman-archives-ui

--

I recently was able to get some mbox files from Terri (the systers-dev mbox
file with dlists was really useful), which helped a lot in the testing
process. As I started testing on the mbox files, I found some problems:

- The thread address was sometimes wrong. The code had set it to the
message's "To" header, but it turns out that sometimes people had Cced the
list and thus the right thread address wasn't in the "To" header. I ended up
creating a list of possible headers to check and ran a loop through the
list.
- Some of the email addresses were showing up as botched, due to different
formatting styles (i.e., some had "First Last" <emailaddress at blah.com>), so
I had to take those into account.

I also realized that including all messages within a conversation on one
page meant that I had to change the archival style. The current method does
it by a period of time (i.e., monthly, quarterly, weekly etc), which means
that if the messages in a conversation were spread across two months (or
quarters, weeks etc), they would not be put in the same conversation page.
Instead, there would be two pages separating the messages of the
conversation for each period of time.

I figured that this wasn't ideal, because conversations that were split up
would lead to confusion. If a person posts a question on the last day of
November and the answer pops up in early December, those messages would not
be placed together, which would lead some people (those looking at the
November archives) to believe that the question never got answered.

Thus, I changed the code to return a single archive for all posts. Then I
realized I had another problem--there were too many posts on one page, and
so as more and more messages were sent to the list, the archives page would
take longer and longer to load. I decided that splitting up the list into
several pages would be a good idea, and so I generated pages based on a set
number of conversations to list per page (default is 20). I then added links
to all pages at the top and bottom of each page.

Here's a screenshot:
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/3706/screenshotthetryallarch.png

Have a great weekend everyone! :)

Yian