User in a broader sense.

Usermin
1

Our new community site we’re building at Joyent with Virtualmin is a collection of projects, comprised of individual members, each member being able to be in zero or more projects.

We’d like to have each member be a bit more than a simple “user”, mainly with their email address (not on our site), name, login, password, street address, phone number and a few more optional things like website and photo say.

We want to make it very easy to build mail lists from this data: at least two mail lists per project.

This is a lot like basic mail list management, but with a site-wide scope.

I don’t think mailman helps with this, it is strictly maillist management, but without the “project management” we seem to require.

So a few questions:

  • I didn’t see mailman on the installable apps section on the demo site. Does VMPro include mailman?
  • Is there a higher level maillist program that has the concept of a large list with sublists created from it?
  • I think the buzzword is "project management". http://www.airset.com/ is a great example of this, but not open source or freely available. Is there a good project management system we might be able to use, hopefully with virtualmin?
2
- I didn't see mailman on the installable apps section on the demo site. Does VMPro include mailman?

Yes, but it’s way too big and complicated to be an Install Script. Actually, it’s way too big and complicated to be a lot of things, including “good”, “easy”, “fast”, etc. But, I guess one could say that about a lot of software, including some of our own. :wink:

You want the virtualmin-mailman module. It’s available for both Virtualmin GPL and Professional.

But it’s not really gonna do what you want, unless you write some code.

- Is there a higher level maillist program that has the concept of a large list with sublists created from it?

Depends. PHPList is a reasonably nice newsletter package that is an Install Script. But it’s not useful for communities…it’s not two way.

- I think the buzzword is "project management". http://www.airset.com/ is a great example of this, but not open source or freely available. Is there a good project management system we might be able to use, hopefully with virtualmin?

Project management means so many different things to so many different people, it’s impossible to say. Joomla and Drupal both have many applications that sound a bit like what you’re after, and at least the CMS core of those two can be installed easily with Virtualmin’s Install Scripts feature. We use Joomla here, and while I don’t love the code (1.5 may be better, but migrating to it from 1.0.x is a bitch), it’s got a lot of pre-built functionality. Drupal is reportedly a nicer codebase.

I and a couple of other folks built a custom community style system for a development site with Virtualmin a few years ago, using Trac, Mailman, MoinMoin, and a few other bits and pieces, but it’s not necessarily as self-directed as you’d like (maybe…I dunno if I really understand your requirements).

You can use custom fields in Virtualmin to gather whatever information you like. And you can make use of that data in many automated ways…including injecting the data into particular places after virtual server creation using the post-create command feature.

3

Thanks Joe.

We went ahead and got the dedicated Joyent "accelerator". Man is Virtualmin empty on dedicated compared with shared!

So we need a bit of help. We’ll need to upgrade to Pro.

You mention an "Upgrade to Professional feature" here:
http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=175812#p175812
… does that mean we buy a license from you and Joyent performs an upgrade?

We definitely need mailman asap, or at least a maillist manager. You mention that the virtualmin-mailman module. What is that and where/how do we get it? Is this something that Joyent initializes … or provides with VM Pro?