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I am in the process to set up a new site with Plone, and I am looking for a simple mailing list / forum implementation.

I am aware of Mailman, of course. But what I am looking for is some hybrid solution which shows discussion threads in a web UI as well as in a users mail client and sends replies subscribers.

Or course, the UI should be managed and integrated in plone.

I'd be happy, if someone could point at the right direction. I'm lost.

For example: Looking at plone org, I see some products based on mailman, which might do the job, but no real contender. Some of the products on plone.org don't even have a description. Searching for mailman shows up kupu in the list. Clicking on this product I see the description: "The most recent released version of Kupu may be found here." Err. Yes, obviously. And what does it do?!?

Is there any simple discussion forum / mailing list product available for plone?

Mikko Ohtamaa
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Peter Jones
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    upvoted back to 0. I'm sorry to see people down voting without comment, I hope that's not just a lazy way of saying you don't think forums should be done in Plone. – Danimal Oct 28 '15 at 11:04
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    @Danimal: People from Python tag tend to be overmoderating StackOverflow rule nazis. I recommend all Plone questions should be asked without Python tag. – Mikko Ohtamaa Oct 30 '15 at 07:15
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    Just started a new addon, currently needs some more love for the categorizations, but that shouldn't be too far away. Reply via mail works. Any feedback very welcome: http://github.com/ida/adi.forumail – Ida Nov 03 '15 at 13:42

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I think the widely accepted answer to this in the Plone community is that Plone is probably not the right tool to build a large forum. This is up for debate, and to be honest I'm not sure myself, but I do know that community.plone.org uses Discourse.

Ploneboard is there of course (as @GhitaB has mentioned), but it's not getting a lot of work done on it at the moment. You could also build your own to suit your own requirements, and you might find the Dexterity based collective.ploneboard a useful starting point for that.

Also, Plone has built in comments functionality which I guess doesn't cover so many features, but could do most of what you are looking for. People do also use a Disqus integration into plone.

Regarding searching for products - you are better off searching pypi than plone.org. And Kupu is a rich text editor like TinyMCE - definitely not what you are looking for (but perhaps compatible with mailman?).

All the best, I'd be interested to hear which direction you end up taking.

Danimal
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    I voted your answer because Ploneboard seems to be a little abandonware. There is now a bug for more than 30 comments in a discussion that make this unusable. https://github.com/collective/Products.Ploneboard/issues/46 – GhitaB Oct 28 '15 at 15:57
  • Thank you very much. I'll post an update once we've made a decision. – Peter Jones Oct 30 '15 at 19:35
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Ploneboard may help you. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Products.Ploneboard

Some features:

  • Forum: Show all recent activity, Show all unanswered
  • Category state: Make free for all, Make moderated, Make private, Require membership to post
  • Conversation state: Active, Lock
GhitaB
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the coactivate.org project is based on plone and has an integration for a mailing list using Listen (found here). you might browse the project resources on github or ask the contributors to find out how they do the mailing-list integration.

fRiSi
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Here are few popular options as-a-service

https://www.discourse.org/ (used by e.g. atom.io, by Github, also OSS)

http://muut.com/ (as-a-service, sends mail notification, provides user integration (commercial)

Tons of PHP-based forums. Stay away from those as their security track records are abysmal.

Mikko Ohtamaa
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