[Imc-alternatives] an important development: not another CMS!?!?

[Jay]

(those of you on the PhillyIMC web list have just seen a similar 
e-mail I sent a couple days ago, but with a slightly different plot 
twist near the end.)

Hi alternatives,

A few days ago I had an extensive and very interesting conversation 
with Ryan from the SF-IMC.  Did you all
read the e-mail from Ryan sent here last week?  It summarized the 
most recent developments in the
indymedia core tech team search for a unified content management 
system (CMS).

Talking with Ryan really helped clear up a lot of my questions about 
the state of the CMS discussions and
its implications for all of us.

Ryan explained to me that when he talks about the indymedia core 
techies he's referring to the group of
a dozen or more techies who are online every day, and have been for 
the seven years since indymedia began,
working together to keep servers up, to respond to hack attacks and 
to maintain indymedia through
international law enforcement investigations.  This crowd has 
generally been broken into two groups -- the
bunch that maintains sf-active, and the one that maintains MIR.  The 
network-wide CMS discussion is
meant to blend these two groups into one cohesive whole, and to move 
forward together to propel
Indymedia into modern times, as we've been discussing here for months.

Right now they are focusing on three options: Plone, Drupal, and 
CakePHP.  Of the three, I'm least
familiar with CakePHP.  Ryan is a proponent of that choice.  He works 
in the web 2.0 world in San
Francisco as a lead engineer for development projects and sees 
CakePHP as as the only of the options that is
both scalable for millions of users, which is an essential 
underpinning of a CMS that will unify a
substantial proportion of the indymedia network, and distributed 
enough to make indymedia impervious to law
enforcement or denial of service attacks.  Whatever the choice, they 
plan to come to a conclusion by the
end of November, and have test sites running in the chosen code by 
the end of 2007.

What are the implications of this for the Alternatives project?  The 
current Alternatives IMC plan is to ride the
PhillyIMC's drupal momentum toward our own drupal site and weave 
social networking capabilities into it.  The
truth is we haven't done any work to test the PhillyIMC drupal site 
yet, let alone build anything new, but it still seems to be the 
plan.  If the CMS choice is Drupal, we'll be in great shape to find 
indymedia developers to help this happen.

However, I did talk with Ryan about the idea of what happens if the 
CMS choice is Cake-PHP.  He says one of
CakePHP's main features is that it is a rapid development code.  He 
says he should be able to rewrite the SF IMC's whole code in 6-10 
hours.  Ryan suggested they might also be interested in working on an 
alternatives imc test site, though may be we'd have to twist their 
arms a bit and present viable reasons why they should put their 
attention our way.  So, the alternatives IMC could instantaneously 
have 12-14 indymedia techs, many of whom are web development 
professionals, working on its site and wouldn't have to continue to 
burden the PhillyIMC development crew with doing all our back end 
code work. Of course, that would be another abrupt change of direction.

Right now the alternatives group has people involved who work 
regularly in Plone, Drupal and even Indycore (hi qwerty).  I'm not 
sure I've heard CakePHP mentioned.  Do any of you have any thought 
about what we should do if the unified CMS choice becomes CakePHP and 
we are presented with the possibility of the Indymedia techs building 
an alternatives site prototype?  Would that exclude absoloutely every 
one of us?  Or, would that finally provide the boost we need to get a 
site working?

Well. That's the picture right now.  The CMS choice has not yet been 
made and all this CakePHP stuff is
speculation.  I'm writing to let the alternatives team know what's 
happening in the Indymedia tech world, now
that I finally understand it.

Jay


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