No subject

benefits of PHPCake lie in its potential to distribute the job of serving the
various Indy sites over various servers. This would potentially make the sites
more reliable, and make it harder for any given site to be taken down. It's
something that's been talked about for a long time, and it's exciting that we
might have finally found a way to do it. But getting this software written,
tested and working, and rolling it out across all the Indy sites, is a *huge*
project. Even if PHPCake emerges as the consensus of the imc-cms process, it
could be a few months or a few years before the process of migrating the whole
network to the new cms is complete.

However, for the imc-alternatives project to get our 1.0 site up, we only need
three things:
1) a server willing to host it
2) a team of geeks willing to agree on one existing software base and build it
for us
3) designers, editors and journalists to make it look pretty, make it usable and
fill it with media for users to use

Personally I favour going ahead with Drupal for imc-alt 1.0. The reasons:
1) A number of imc sites are already using Drupal, including Philly, whose geeks
are willing to actively support this work for us.
2) We only have one geek (Dave from Axxs) who could support a Plone site
(correct me if I'm wrong) and I dislike having single points of failure, or
resting such a responsibility on one person.
2) Other options like CakePhP and Ruby on Rails may be options for the future,
but they are works in progress, whereas we know Drupal is ready for imc use.

So, do we have a server willing to host an iteration of Drupal for us? Do we
have a team of geeks willing to put the site together for us? Do we have a
designer willing to implement our desired look and feel? Assuming the answer is
yes, I say we go for it! I would even suggest setting up an
imc-alternatives-tech list where the nuts and bolts of getting this done could
be worked out without boggling the minds of the non-techs, with regular
report-backs to this list in plain language ;)

That leaves the non-geeks on this list with three tasks:
1) Sort out how we want the site to look and feel, and how want it to work for
us as admins, editors, publishers, and readers (the concept of users stories was
useful here).
2) Get an alternatives category added to our local IMC and start publishing the
stories we would want to see on the 1.0 site once it exists
3) Continue to promote the concept of imc-alternatives and encourage more people
to get involved

I may be disappearing for the rest of March and April, to help crew the NORML
CannaBus on it's first national tour promoting drug law reform in Aotearoa. If
this happens I will attempt to check my email periodically but won't be able to
put much time in for a while. Would be thrilling to see consensus on our name,
and software, so these tasks can be delegated and some more forward motion achieved.

Kia kaha koutou! (keep up the good work all)
Strypes

Jay wrote:
> Michael and everyone,
> 
> At 2/23/2008, lancaster-imc at riseup.net wrote:
>> Hey, I just wanted to let everyone know I updated the wiki for IMC-Alt by
>> adding the top horizontal menu to all the pages for easier navigation.
>> Also, I  noticed on the tech page (I think) that it talks about Drupal as
>> the first install. From what I have gathered things have changed and now
>> php cake is the cms language of choice--Someone with the direct line on
>> the specific tech plan should probably update that page.
>>
>> Michael
> 
> It's confusing.  Over the last few months I've been enthusiastic 
> about our going with whatever backend code the imc-cms group decides 
> upon.  However, as time goes on with no clear CMS choice, I've become 
> less enthusiastic.
> 
> I honestly am not sure what I think now.  There is still a lot of 
> positive drupal energy in this group, but we haven't had anyone step 
> forward and say "we're going to make this site work in drupal, 
> darnit, so let's go!"  I like the arguments Ryan has for CakePHP, and 
> am intrigued by the possible choice to go that direction.
> 
> I really don't want our project to wait indefinitely to get ourselves 
> going just so we can line up with the general indy code.  However, 
> the benefits of being part of the overall network push toward a 
> unified code are really appealing.
> 
> What do other people think about this?  Should we continue to 
> wait?  Or should we redouble our efforts to build something based on 
> the PhillyIMC drupal code, as we agreed upon a long while ago?
> 
> Jay