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

[levin at riseup.net]

Quoting 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.

thats what was attempted here:
https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/ImcDrupalDev#How_do_IMCs_use_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.

the results are here:
https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/ImcDrupalDevModules

> 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 ?

drupal 6 versions exist. if you want to see what a basic install of  
the indymedia_alba looks like, there's one here:  
http://newimc.puscii.nl/

i think providing this basic info would be great and i think the wiki  
is as good a place to put it as any - it just needs work. its the kind  
of info i was looking for when i sent out the survey...

cheers
levin

>
> 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.
>
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