I spent much of the summer building an intranet in Django for Miles’ school. Since the school is a co-op, we need to keep track a lot of stuff – charges, credits, and obligations, parents, students, teachers, family jobs, committee membership, the board, etc. etc. I’m happy with how the site came out, but unfortunately can’t share it here, since it’s a private site.
One of the goals of the rebuild was to put an end to the laborious manual process of maintaining the school’s multiple overlapping mailing lists. Since all of those relationships, people types, and groups were already stored in the intranet’s database, I figured it should be possible to run various queries and populate Mailman mailing lists from them directly. Due to the messy nature of the real world, the process was a lot trickier than it sounds on paper, but I eventually did get a smoothly working list generation system up and running, talking to our Django system and working with virtually no manual intervention. Members can update their own profiles and find that their mailing list subscription address has changed automatically a few hours later. Administrators can give someone a new family job or board position and that person will find themselves subscribed to the right mailing list for it later that day.
Since there isn’t much published out there on making these two systems (Django and Mailman) play nicely together, I decided to publish the scripts and document the recipe I used to get it all working. Hope someone finds the system useful.