Bradley M. Kuhn

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Branding GNU Mailman Headers & Footers

Saturday 8 November 2014 by Bradley M. Kuhn

As always, when something takes me a while to figure out, I try to post the generally useful technical information on my blog. For the new copyleft.org site, I've been trying to get all the pages branded properly with the header/footer. This was straightforward for ikiwiki (which hosts the main site), but I spent an hour searching around this morning for how to brand the GNU Mailman instance on lists.copyleft.org.

Ultimately, here's what I had to do to get everything branded, and I'm still not completely sure I found every spot. It seems that if someone wanted to make a useful patch to GNU Mailman, you could offer up a change that unifies the HTML templating and branding. In the meantime, at least for GNU Mailman 2.1.15 as found in Debian 7 (wheezy), here's what you have to do:

First, some of the branding details are handled in the Python code itself, so my first action was:

                # cd /var/lib/mailman/Mailman
                # cp -pa htmlformat.py /etc/mailman
                # ln -sf /etc/mailman/htmlformat.py htmlformat.py
              

I did this because htmlformat.py is not a file that the Debian package install for Mailman puts in /etc/mailman, and I wanted to keep track with etckeeper that I was modifying that file.

The primary modifications that I made to that file were in the MailmanLogo() method, to which I added a custom footer, and to Document.Format() method, to which I added a custom header (at least when not self.suppress_head). The suppress_head thing was a red flag that told me it was likely not enough merely to change these methods to get a custom header and footer on every page. I was right. Ultimately, I had to also change nearly all the HTML files in /etc/mailman/en/, each of which needed different changes based on what files they were, and there was no clear guideline. I guess I could have added <MM-Mailman-Footer> to every file that had a </BODY> but didn't have that yet to get my footer everywhere, but in the end, I custom-hacked the whole thing.

My full patches that I applied to all the mailman files is available on copyleft.org, in case you want to see how I did it.

Posted on Saturday 8 November 2014 at 12:10 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

Submit comments on this post to <bkuhn@ebb.org>.