[imc-cms] Comments on process and the 3 short listed CMS'

[Robbt]

I don't know if we need to get aggravated about this, although I 
understand how frustrating process can be especially when people come in 
after decisions have been made.

Boud does have a point. I was planning on being involved in the 
tech-meet conference and read the invites and the like but was not aware 
that one of the main purposes was to choose a CMS for Indymedia. At the 
same time this doesn't mean we should revert back to our original large 
list of CMS and start over.

Is there a need to try and choose one recommended CMS over all others ?

The defacto choice many new IMC's have been making for the last few 
years has been Drupal. When we started our IMC here in Columbus, Ohio we 
(well mainly I) reviewed
the existing codebases and found that a lot of them were difficult to 
work with and lacking in easy customization and features, which makes 
sense. Drupal is being developed by a lot of people, many of them doing 
it full-time vs. a small effort being developed in spare time from 
scratch. Drupal-IMC could still use a lot of help and cohesion, and I 
think that it wouldn't be a bad choice if we were to choose one CMS to 
support and I could list a lot of reasons, but I'm not sure if this is 
the proper channel.

Drupal needs work, if we were to develop an install recipe and a Drupal 
IMC package we could help work out some of the bugs and decide upon a 
ideal way to get drupal working for IMC's. Or at least document the many 
different ways you can do something. I know that would of been helpful 
to us, and has been helpful in the past. The hidden module developed by 
an indymedia contributor is a great example.

To counter Plone, it's a little tech heavy for start-up Indymedia's. A 
lot of IMC's don't have their own server. I've been running our site off 
of a VPS for a couple of years now due to difficulty finding a server to 
properly run Drupal within the network.
Basically you need your own server to run Plone, whereas Drupal and a 
Indymedia recipe could be set-up very easily by anyone with even shared 
hosting, it also uses less memory. From what I understand when you 
actually get under the hood though
Plone is technically superior in many ways, I just worry about requiring 
such heavy-duty hard-to get started with CMS.

I'm not familiar enough with CakePHP other than it being a framework for 
developing a CMS, it might work out to be another useful solution, but 
I'm doubtful of it being able to reach the feature set that is possible 
with Drupal. Also Mambo was the left-over from a fork where the active 
community developers split from a corporate driven conflict and they 
created Joomla which has been much more actively maintained and 
developed. So they pretty much have to rebuild their code from scratch 
because the developer base wasn't there.

I'm sure that I've already not mentioned countless CMS that could be 
developed for, and the stuff the Riseup.Net people are doing with Ruby 
on Rails is also interesting, as far as crabgrass and their social 
networking platform.

I think that the real problem confronting Indymedia as a network from a 
CMS perspective is rescuing all of the Indymedia's that lack a heavy 
tech presence from drowning in SPAM and outdated frameworks. This has 
been the reality that people are trapped in frameworks like DADAimc, and 
others. Just suggesting Drupal without a lot of work to develop more 
documentation and some interesting themes/set-ups will just mean a lot 
of bland looking websites, but if we were able to focus our attention 
together to help with the coding of some modules and develop an install 
recipe it could be good. If there is a better place/format to help chime 
in on the decision please let me know the process I just figured I would 
be courageous and throw my 2 cents into the fold.

Robbt from cbusimc.org