[imc-scotland-discussion] flaws with Drupal

[Tom Morton]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Ulla wrote:
> Hi Harry, (hi Tom)
> 
> I agree with you that DADA was not sustainable anymore. I do agree with you 
> that Tom has put a lot of the work  into migrating the site. 
> 
> However, I do think that some of the current implementation could be fatal to 
> the Scotland indymedia project, and looking over the list of sites which 
> moved to Drupal 
> http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/ImcDrupalDev
> and are now not active anymore or have very low activity, for me it is though 
> arguably partly the utilisation of the software. ( Very shocking is 
> Melbourne Indymedia's inactivity for me as they were particularly strong in 
> Woomera 2002.)
> 
> 
> As Drupal has not been developed to be used for indymedia, but more as one 
> person's own CMS website, it misses for example vital fields in the publish 
> form, such as author, organisation, addresses, email addresses, URL for 
> related article and another for organisation and copyright/creative commons 
> information. 
> Also the possibility for  file uploading is limited to Blogging needs,

You can add arbitrary fields to drupal nodes (articles). It is very
extensible.

> Have looked around other Drupal sites and pretty much all of them seem to have 
> a minimalised publish form, interestingly adaptions have been made but it 
> seems every other IMC has dealt differently with it - Austria IMC has added 
> author and email fields, whereas Columbus IMC has added URL fields, St.Louis 
> the copyright information options and Boston has still its DADA publish form 
> and not migrated yet, which is interesting as comparison:
> http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/index.php?function=publish

Yeah. We have one of the best submission forms of all the drupal IMCs.

> Looking at other websites, what seems also good is:
> - The Image Gallery of IMC Napoli:
> http://napoli.indymedia.org/image
> 
> - The Archive of IMC Roma:
> http://roma.indymedia.org/archive

Yes it would be nice to have this. I could write it in an hour or so but
I can't begin until the weekend (which for me is the 4 days of the week
I am not working).

> - The site map of Imc Liguria:
> http://liguria.indymedia.org/sitemap

Trivial. Actually any admin can create this (as a Page), linking to the
relevant taxonomy terms.

> - The topic list of St.Louis.
> - The rss-feeds of Blogs/ frontpage inclusion of  e.g. in Columbus imc, etc.
> 
> 
> Anyways, what is annoying is that at the moment it sems no audio nor video 
> files can be added to Imc scotland and that participation does not seem to be 
> encouraged.

Yes this was a little oversight. I've fixed it.

In the future I'm planning to support flash videos like youtube and all
those sites do.

> To sum up:
> 
> Problems with Indymedia Scotland on Drupal at the moment:
> 
> A) Participation does not seem to be encouraged

??

> 	1.) Publish form
> - is not inviting enough. 
> - there are no fields/boxes for author, email address, website address/URL, 	   
>    organisation, no creative commons/ copyright/public domain choice or
>    information, difficulties to upload several pictures/files at once, no URL 



> - (also in conjunction editorial interface: no easy backdating of articles – 
> making archiving and carrying over of old 2001-2003 content more difficult)

It would be nicer to do a proper db import rather than manually enter
the old stuff from the UK region. Some drupal indymedia coders have
taken interest in our Drupal 6 work and hopefully this will result in
import scripts for sf-active, mir, and other CMSes.

> - images can not be placed where wanted by author, as well as thumbnail choice 
> and location limited

Yes they can! Are you using konqueror? It doesn't work with the WYSIWYG
editor because it just lacks the features necessary. I should add a
message for when people have browsers old/crap enough to be incompatible.

This problem will diminish with time. On windows, internet explorer has
had the necessary features to support WYSIWYG editing for more than 7 years.

The image insert thing still works when WYSIWYG is not used.

> 2.)Comments
> - comment box/field should be directly under article, not 2 clicks away
> - comments should be fully displayed directly under article, not three clicks 
> away

Maybe. This can be done. We should certainly discuss at the next meeting
how comments are to be displayed.

UK also do that thing where only the titles of comments are visible
until you click 'view comments'.

> - add a comment: no field/box for author name, article and other comments not 
> - viewable whilst making comment of your own – difficult to refer to other 
> comments or text or respond, difficulty of enabling discussions
> - comment not fully viewable even if clicked on “view comment” -several clicks 
> away. too
> 
> 
> B) Moderation/Editorial
> 
> 1.) Newswire:
> - local/elsewhere

we decided not to do this in a meeting. It can be done but the effect we
decided wasn't good.

> 
> As on Mike's take that 
> ">>Indymedia Scotland is in a stronger and more
>>> positive situation than for a long time" ,
>  it depends on the evaluation criteria   - if the collective is concerned and 
> the amount of Indymedia Scotland members putting in regular and reliable 
> committment, than that is true, 
> if it would mean hits/read per article than we are in the worst position now 
> than ever - the strongest we were as a subsection on indy uk where we usually 
> had many more hits per day per newswire article. (even before rss feeds 
> became popular.)
> And more  when we had the millions hits per day in november 2003 on Indy UK
> during anti-Bush demonstrations/FTAA/Bolivia presidential crisis and the 
> three millions hits per day during the G8 2005. 
> 
> Furthermore the broadness of contributed content has declined.

You have got me thinking about levels of contributions over the last few
years. I imagined that 2007 had been an abnormally quiet year for IMC
scotland, but generating statistics this turns out not to be true.
Actually, after growing in 2004, IMC scotland has been practically
static in terms of contributed articles over 2005,2006,2007.

These statistics are for articles (not comments,features,media), visible
(not hidden), not deleted:

	Articles
2003	15
2004	458
2005	750
2006	728
2007	720
2008    200 (incomplete)

	All articles (including hidden)
2003	16
2004	625
2005	1041
2006	1072
2007	1153
2008	307 (incomplete


Here is a month breakdown of the articles (visible):

	2004

jan	1
feb	0
mar	10
apr	6
may	64
jun	60
jul	72
aug	67
sep	31
oct	56
nov	52
dec	39

	2005

jan	39
feb	52
mar	54
apr	0   <-- was the site down all of april '05?
may	60
jun	97
jul	128  <-- G8
aug	60
sep	65
oct	59
nov	87
dec	49

	2006

jan	64
feb	57
mar	54
apr	65
may	59
jun	50
jul	83
aug	62
sep	42
oct	68
nov	72
dec	52

	2007

jan	60
feb	45
mar	64
apr	56
may	65
jun	58
jul	62
aug	61
sep	68
oct	57
nov	68
dec	56

	2008

jan	40
feb	58
mar	79
apr	23 (incomplete)
may	0


So basically 60 articles (that survive moderation) per month is typical
over the entire last 3 years. That means that if the new site is getting
2 articles per day, we are as busy (in terms of contributions) as during
the G8 year of 2005.

Of course, we don't want to get obsessed with statistics.

- --
Tom
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFIIMw7IX74tNgvzwMRAmSJAJ404lc2kDlUpcnuHQqlZq086Fv0agCffppa
hdyW3Kci+kqxN8F52y08A/c=
=eD90
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----