Friday, September 6, 2013

Dada Mail, v6.6.0 Released!

I've just put out a new release of Dada Mail - v6.6.0. Its  a web-based mailing list manager, written in Perl. You can check out/fork/push/pull the source code here. Some of its main goals is to be pretty easy to install by mere mortals, easy to work with, yet pretty darn powerful and flexible, to fill a ton of different needs - it's not really trying to be a replacement to the creaky Majordomo, or Mailman. 

I'm heading up to my 14th year of developing the application. It's currently free to download from its own support site as well as from various installer services that have popped up in the last few years (Mojo Marketplace, Installatron, Softaculous, etc) Follow along with the project on Twitter, or hey - we have a mailing list too!

There's lots of things a like about working on it, but the application has become quite monolithic, and a little less flexible in its underlying code, than I'd like. In the next few months, I'm hoping to alleviate that, without falling into the problem of totally rewriting the app (it would be almost impossible to do so, with a one-dude team).

My initial idea is to move from basically no framework, to working with CGI::Application. That should help me gain some sort of framework, and a way to break the overgrowth of parts of this app, into more manageable pieces. It'll also hopefully give me a bridge to be able to have Dada Mail run as a CGI script (how people are used to running Dada Mail), as well as a PSGI app (a great alternative, that has a TON of benefits, one being SPEED!).

From there, we'll see how it works, but it may be time to move on to some more whiz-bang things that a framework like Mojolicious would provide. The bummer with trying to move to Mojolicious is that the Perl version required is rarely met on the shared hosting accounts that the majority of people who run Dada Mail are on. Saying, "hey, just install perlbrew!" is a far cry on what lots of people are capable of. They're used to a one-click install. Sigh.

Maybe cPanel, being a Perl-based shop, knows of a better way to have available a more up-to-date Perl version? A how-to, so not to fudge this up, would be super-helpful and somewhat break huge shackles from those that ship apps for this types of hosting situations. (maybe you know?)

Without further ado, here's the changelog from this last release: