leyton.org

How to integrate Wordpress and an e-mail list, such that posts to the e-mail list get posted as weblog articles (for wider reading of the discussions), but that responses get attached as comments to reflect the discussion and debate?

Below is an early-preview of a tweak I’ve made to Postie, the excellent Wordpress plugin to integrate e-mail and wordpress.

For some time now, I’ve run the website labtastic.org. It started out as a mailing list at a company I used to work for, and since everybody there went their separate ways we’ve stayed in touch via the mailing list in it’s various incarnations.

A year or two ago, fed up with the inconsistency of the various hosts we’d been using, I registered labtastic.org, and we moved the mailing list there. At last a place where it could stay, without any further upheaval.

Once things had settled, the next thought was to open up the mailing list to a few other people by making the various ramblings and postings available on a website. So I setup wordpress, and configured the default wp-mail.php mail gateway. It had limited success, as a web browser complete with cookies was necessary to fetch mail.

More recently, I upgraded to Postie, a drop-in replacement to wp-mail, which does a much better job, properly handles pictures and attachments, and can also be pinged automatically with a crontab on an always-on machine, so midnight ramblings can appear without anybody having to do anything.

This was 80% of what I wanted. This worked because the mailing list “exploder” contains a member that is essentially the mailbox that Postie is checking. But the problem was that it’s a mailing list that’s being mapped onto the website. This meant that, aside from the usual “this is interesting” or “this is my opinion” post, there’s a bit of banter. Replies and discussions.

Postie, and wp-mail, just don’t support that at the moment. They’re e-mail gateways that enable web/mobloggers to post to their website. All very well, but a reply to a previous post is not distinguished, and another post results. So an e-mail titled say, “Google launches BigDaddy”, results - as you’d expect - in a new article. But a list member replies to the same post, on the mailing list (with an e-mail titled “Re: Google launches BigDaddy”), and it gets tidied up and posted as another article. Rather than as a comment on the original post.

So - as I had nothing more productive to do this afternoon - I’ve had a go at fixing that in Postie, and once it’s tested some more I think it’ll make a big difference to the applications that Wordpress can be applied to. There are, after all, Usenet/mailing list interfaces. I’m just hugely surprised that there wasn’t anything readily available to do weblog/mailing list integration in a better way.

I can’t be the only person wanting to properly integrate a mailing list and a weblog, can I?

Drop me a note if you’d like to get the diff to Postie. I’ll be working on it some more, and I’m talking to Dirk, who wrote and maintains Postie, so you never know, you might get it for free if he likes what I’ve done (my poor PHP aside!).