[Imc-drupal-dev] IMC related drupal documentation and wishlist

[robbt at azone.org]

So I agree for the most part with the idea that we don't necessarily need
an install profile so much as a bunch of documentation on how to set-up a
Drupal based IMC. 

I'm not sure if this would be super helpful for the IMC's that have next to
no tech related help, but at least if we had a set of default procedures
and workflows we could utilize this in order to set-up a site for them
without having to spend a lot of time deliberating over the best way to do
something within drupal.

I know someone also did a survey of how people were deploying Drupal
network wide but I'm not sure where the results are for this or what
determinations were made.

I'm definitely thankful to MarkB for developing the various IMC related
drupal modules such as the cities list, the hidden module and IP
anonymizer, they're great.

I guess the install profile is listed on our Wiki but isn't up yet. Does
anyone have an update on this ? http://drupal.org/project/indymedia_alba ?

For the purposes of my local IMC what I've been meaning to do and am
interested in seeing developed is this.

Aggregating Other IMC's content: Possibly using FeedAPI integration of RSS
from Indymedia.Us, Indymedia.org and other regional IMC's to populate the
newswires with articles automatically vs. relying upon manual input from
volunteers. 

I've looked at FeedAPI and found it to be pretty complex and confusing, at
least not straightforward and I really just need to RTFM and play around
with it, but if others have already done so perhaps this would be a good
place to document.

This brings me to a project I'd really like to see our local IMC and
potentially other IMCs engage in, being aggregation hubs for community and
local media. 

I personally don't see IMC's replacing blogs as the medium in which most
citizen journalism is going to take place, the move towards decentralized
and aggregated through linking is actually a beneficial move in many
regards in terms of making information harder to censor etc. What I want to
see is our IMC become more relevant locally within the blogger culture,
empowering people who don't know how to create their own blog and/or
providing training/support for people interested in getting started with
journalism and then providing an aggregator for the media they produce.

What I'd like to see from the IMC network as a whole is a means of
aggregating and sharing our content reliably between the network. I think
they are moving towards this with the IMC-CMS project but it is also seems
hyper-concentrated on highly technical solutions and an overall development
strategy that I'm skeptical of due to its reliance upon our own development
teams reinventing the wheel and developing so much of the code from
scratch, and then continuing to upkeep and maintain it, when it's been
shown various times that the IMC techies are so busy just keeping our
servers running.

I personally would like to see the IMC-CMS effort succeed but I'm not much
of a coder and I'm pretty familiar/confident with Drupal and customizing it
to provide a solution. I'd like to see it work in conjunction with whatever
aggregation/decentralization the IMC-CMS team is able to come up with, but
we'd have to study/coordinate with what is being developed over there in
order for this to be a possibility.

So I'd like to help develop an aggregation strategy utilizing drupal and/or
custom code based upon standardized RSS feeds and/or whatever else would be
needed.

Drupal and Multimedia is really a whole nother can of worms/possibilities.

I think the best thing we could do for IMC's in general is to analyze and
document the various ways to do things and jump in and help out where
needed code wise. I'm sure many developers are already doing this.

There are various projects and groups working on Drupal related multimedia
and various modules that are difficult to figure out and set-up initially
and there are easy ones that are kind of limited in terms of their
capability and future.

For instance we were asking for a knight-foundation grant but there are
already projects very similar to what we may need being funded with
developers that we could potentially provide input/participation/feedback
as a group to http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project for one and
http://radioengage.com/

I'd say the audio and video module fall into the later. They work but need
work and have limited upgrade potential. I see audio 6.0 at least being
developed, but video 6.0 doesn't even appear to be on the radar. 

There are a lot of things such as media mover and embedded media field that
seem cool but take time to get going and lack support for open resources
such as archive.org last I checked predominantly focused on commercial
video service providers. This is a project that someone could help take on
(getting embedded media field to support archive.org), it's a itch I have
but I haven't been dedicated enough to figure it out.

Image handling is another very complex and potentially frustrating realm
for Drupal with no standard way of handling things, which is fine if you
decide upon a certain set-up but if you were a drupal novice and stepped
into this, this is where it would be very helpful for a standard IMC set-up
to be prescribed that would be functional enough.

I haven't even really looked into images in 6.0 but we have been using IMCE
and FCKEditor (WYSIWYG) together and it has been a lot better than nothing
but not perfect.

The best captcha solution is also a good idea to figure out, it seems that
some robots can beat the standard drupal captchas but they work far better
than most.
Does recaptcha since it requires a API key also log the IP of our
clients/potentially compromise anonymity ? This is something to look into
because if so it shouldn't be used but otherwise I like the idea of helping
read books.


The varnish proxy server idea is also cool, but I would like to see a howto
or something along those lines in order to get it set-up. Perhaps this
could provide some security and redundancy. I'd also like to see torrents
being utilized for large multimedia files far more often and better
coordination with the Miro player. (the list just keeps getting longer)

If we start to document this process better and really push for Drupal as a
permanent solution vs. stop-gap measure for the IMC network perhaps we
should think about requesting drupal.indymedia.org and setting up a page to
rehost the documentation etc, at the same time the wiki that exists now is
probably functional enough and there is a pretty good infrastructure within
the drupal.org project with our drupal group and the various project pages.


Ok, well I'm going to cross-post this to our drupal group but I thought
that I'd spend sometime sharing my thoughts and trying to keep some
momentum and discussion going on my part.