[Imc-alternatives] Status of PhillyIMC and some CMS comments.

[David Zwarg]

Greetings all-

It's been a while, but for good reason -- we've been hard at work here  
in Philly getting our site ported from Mir to Drupal.  Mr. Couch and I  
have been diligently working through the Drupal core and modules to  
find a "core" set of modules that can be used to build a simple IMC  
from the standard Drupal core and modules.

We sat down to have this conversation a while back, and decided that  
it wouldn't be worth our time to develop a new CMS, as we wanted to  
build a new community site, and didn't want to pioneer a new software  
development project.  We have more energy working with community, and  
less energy to build software.  Fortunately, Drupal has a HUGE  
community of developers, of which an active developer community exists  
here in Philly, facilitating some face-to-face tech support time when  
needed.

The trick for us has been porting our existing content from our Mir  
database to the Drupal database.  This is no trivial thing, and Mr.  
Muth has put in a great deal of time to come up with a script that  
will translate Mir content into Drupal content.  What a life saver.   
We are at a point where this final translation step needs to happen to  
build up the content in our new Drupal database before going to 'beta'  
mode.

The great thing about this approach is that after the research Mr.  
Couch and I have done for the modules in Drupal, when we sat down to  
build the new PhillyIMC site with a list of modules, it took about a  
day to configure the modules and the base Drupal installation to get a  
simple IMC-like site up and running.  This doesn't include the time  
for the theming, which was performed by Mr. Couch at no little expense.

We are excited to be on the edge of releasing a Drupal-IMC type  
package, or at least instructions on which steps to take to make an  
IMC out of Drupal.  One thing we haven't done a good job with is  
communicating our progress along the way.  Have no fear, this is  
close.  We don't want to overlap the work done in other areas, and we  
have probably done so, seeing these discussions on imc-cms and so on.

To wrap it up: we are close to getting a new PhillyIMC out the door,  
and we want to work with other developers in indymedia to polish up  
something nice and easy to swallow for the new IMC developers -- web  
3.0/4.0/bring it on.  I mentioned this earlier, but I think it's worth  
repeating: IMC energy is much better spent supporting communities than  
supporting software.

Many of my $0.02.

z