USENET and E-mail Archiver for Drupal

Project Description:

Create a Drupal module to archive USENET and E-mail messages and present them to users as Web-based archives similar to Google Groups.

Motivation:

Very few open-source PHP-based solutions exist that can do mail and USENET archiving well. By developing this module, many sites will be able to put their archives on-line within a modern content management framework like Drupal.

Success criteria:

The project will be deemed successful if old-style mailing list archives (for example, the archives at http://drupal.org/mailing-lists) can be loaded and maintained as a native Drupal 4.7 solution.

Roadmap:

1. Install Drupal and get acquainted with the structure of Drupal's modules and hooks.

2. Study the working of the mailarchive module. This module provide a decent foundation to base your work on.

3. Convert the mailarchive module to use Drupal 4.7's Forms API. You may want to use the Forms Updater module to help you with this task.

4. Use the Views Module to present database content.

5. Extend the module to allow users to navigate through the archives by year, month and day. Users must be able to sort message lists by thread, subject, author and date. The module must be able to present messages as threaded and flat views.

6. Display statistics per list/ group - number of messages in archive, Avg/month, top posters, most popular topics, etc. A graph showing activity over time would be great, but is not required.

7. Implement RSS feeds for remote syndication.

8. If time permits, optimise the solution, remove unused columns & indexes and make benchmarks available to the Drupal community.