On Feb 1, 2022, at 11:01 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:

On 2/1/22 09:47, Duane Raymond wrote:

...

Hi, I'm looking to do some radical customisation of the Postorius (and Hyperkitty) templates over the next 6 ish months and was wondering if there is a 'best practice' way to do this that will survive updates to MM3. I've searched around and not found much and also tested copying venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/postorius/templates/postorius/lists/summary.html to var/templates/lists/summary.html As suggested in some posts - but it didn't seem to pick up the customisation - only customisations in the venv path worked - and they get overwritten on update.

The var/templates directory has a specific structure and is only for custom list specific, domain specific and sitewide templates used for notifications from Mailman core. It has nothing to do with Postorius or HyperKitty templates.

...

Is there a 'best' way for this? I'd also like to eventually share them with the community and maybe add them to the repo if people want that....but for now I'll start with my own experiments. (and if there is documentation I have missed for this, let me know!)

I don't know about a best way, but the way I do this is to keep all local mods as patches to the base and apply those patches as part of the upgrade process.

The best way to do this would be utilize Django’s template loader. See here1 for the documentation on how you can do this. You want to put the path where you are putting the templates under DIRS option of the TEMPLATES section.

Do make sure that you are keeping the directory structure correct so that Django can discover them. Like, Hyperkitty’s base.html should be in /custom/path/hyperkitty/base.html, where /custom/path is what you’ve setup in DIRS setting above.

One important point to note here is that we can’t promise to not break your custom template in future, because the values passed in the template’s context is not a public or stable API. So, it is technically possible for us to remove/change the variables that are being passed. In practice, I can’t remember when was the last time I removed a variable, so this would work better than patching since you are doing “radical customisation”, which Mark isn’t.

-- thanks, Abhilash Raj (maxking)

On Feb 7, 2022, at 4:35 AM, Duane Raymond <duane@fairsay.com> wrote:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022 at 00:56, Abhilash Raj <maxking@asynchronous.in> wrote:

...

...

On Feb 1, 2022, at 11:01 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:

On 2/1/22 09:47, Duane Raymond wrote:

...

Hi, I'm looking to do some radical customisation of the Postorius (and Hyperkitty) templates over the next 6 ish months and was wondering if there is a 'best practice' way to do this that will survive updates to MM3. I've searched around and not found much and also tested copying

venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/postorius/templates/postorius/lists/summary.html

...

to var/templates/lists/summary.html As suggested in some posts - but it didn't seem to pick up the customisation - only customisations in the venv path worked - and they get overwritten on update.

...

The best way to do this would be utilize Django’s template loader. See here[1] for the documentation on how you can do this. You want to put the path where you are putting the templates under DIRS option of the TEMPLATES section.

Do make sure that you are keeping the directory structure correct so that Django can discover them. Like, Hyperkitty’s base.html should be in /custom/path/hyperkitty/base.html, where /custom/path is what you’ve setup in DIRS setting above.

I hadn’t tried it when I sent email, but when I tried it locally on Postorius, it seems to work for me.

This looks promising! I've not got it working yet, but this is what I've tried:

1. Created folder 'custom' in the mm root (in my case: /opt/mailman/mm/)
2. Copied the files and folders from postorius/templates/postorius/* and hyperkitty/templates/hyperkitty/* to the custom/ folder (not the full postorius/templates/postorius/ match, just evening in the second postorius/ dirrectory)

Note that you want to copy from “src/postorius/templates” directory to your "/opt/mailman/mm/custom” directory. It is important that you retain the “postorius” and “hyperkitty” directories.

Here is what I have in my settings.py:

•    'DIRS': [],

•    'DIRS': ['/Users/maxking/Documents/mm3/postorius/example_project/templates’],

And here is the structure of the templates directory you are seeing above:

$ tree /Users/maxking/Documents/mm3/postorius/example_project/templates /Users/maxking/Documents/mm3/postorius/example_project/templates └── postorius └── lists └── summary.html

Note that I am only overriding the Summary page here.

3. Recursive update of permissions of the custom/ folder and files to be mailman
4. Updated /opt/mailman/mm/settings.py by changing "'DIRS': []" to "'DIRS': [BASE_DIR, '/custom/']" in the "TEMPLATES =" section

Note that you don’t want [“BASE_DIR”, “/custom/“] here, the comma is the wrong value here. The docs I mentioned have a “/“.

Although, it is possible that even “/“ since that needs BASE_DIR to be a Path datatype and not string.

Easiest thing with least surprise would be to use the full path, atleast to ensure that template discovery works as expected.

5. Edited the original AND copied postorius/lists/summary.html to have a small change in the footer of each so I know what version it is serving

Since I was running a dev server, it doesn’t need restart, but simply restarting gunicorn should should do it. You don’t need to restart anything else.

6. Restarted: gunicorn qcluster mailman nginx and cleared browser cache
7. Reloaded the 'info' page of a few lists to see which version ti was serving

Variants: I've also changed the DIRS value to the hard-coded path: /opt/mailman/mm/custom

Result: it is still serving the default/original Postorius template vs the custom one.

Any suggestions for things I should do to make it use the /custom/ folder instead? Any recompiling or other actions beyond just restarting? (I probably don't need to restart qcluster and maybe not even mailman core for this to take effect but I do it just in case!)

Hope that helps.

-- thanks, Abhilash Raj (maxking)

Duane Raymond writes:

Is anyone out there working on an overhaul of the web interface templates

Yes. There's a big accessibility project being done by a well-resourced organization. If you're going to be doing the kind of substantial work you describe, write me off-list and I'll do some introductions. (That applies to anybody reading this; project participation is by introduction, "well-resourced" doesn't mean "infinite" ;-), but anybody making a substantial contribution has need-to-know.)

I'm not sure how much is still publicly available since the ownership change, but you might want to look at the Affinity and Empathy projects at emwd.com. The code is PHP but you may get some ideas from the UIs.

Steve

My apologies. I misunderstood what you were trying to achieve.

Apologies for the noise :-)

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022, 11:57 Duane Raymond, <duane@fairsay.com> wrote:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022 at 08:46, Philip Colmer <philip.colmer@linaro.org> wrote:

...

The REST API provides a means to customise templates on a list, domain or site context.

https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rest/docs/t...

Perhaps I misunderstood, but this seems to focus on the email message templates, and not html Postorius and Hyperkitty templates....or were you suggesting I adapt the script below for use with patches and Postorius and Hyperkitty templates? Seems like a plausible idea of the django template method Abhilash Raj pointed me to doesn't work.

...

We use a very simple script that takes a text file from the current directory and, when run locally on a MM3 server, uses the REST API to update the template on a site context, thus affecting all lists and all domains on the same server.

from mailman.testing.documentation import call_http
def update_template(template_name, template_file):
    """ Update the specified template """
    print("Updating", template_name)
    call_http(
        'http://localhost:8001/3.1/uris',
        {
            template_name: template_file
        },
        method='PATCH',
        username="restadmin",
        password="restpass"
    )
update_template(
    "list:admin:action:post",
    "file:///home/ubuntu/mm3-templates/list:admin:action:post.txt"
)

The API documentation lists out the various template names that can be used.

https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/