[Imc-uk-network] FW: Open process

[anargeek]

Hi

On Tue 27-Apr-2010 at 10:48:48PM +0100, Mara wrote:
> 
> Without any discussion more specific than "a front-page
> syndicating content from all local collectives", changes
> were made to the Uk Mir site, to enable syndication.
> While I really appreciate the work that has gone into
> this, I do think that it should have happened on a
> development site, not the live site. Making changes to
> the live Uk site with no consultation at all is not
> exactly consensus decision making, and while I do not
> want to suggest that this was intentional, in effect it
> is not very inclusive.

I'm sorry, I didn't have a working development site for
John to work on (though I do now thanks to Ian) and it's
taken literally years to find a Mir techie with the time
and willing to help add the feature in, so given the
limited window of oppertunity that presenteted itself on
Friday, when John said he was able to help, we when for it
and implemented it in the simplest and easiest way that it
could be done to get it up and running. I understood that
we have long had a consensus that we wanted the UK site to
pull in articles from the other sites -- I had no idea
that this was going to be so contentious!

I agree that the sudden implementation wasn't ideal but
the key bit of code that nobody in the UK could do is now
in place (it turned out to be about 90 lines of XML), the
next step, of further tweaking the templates, can be now
done on a development server at a slower pace.

A few days ago some small initial template changes were
made, as people will have seen, based on the initial
feedback via email and in comments on the site:

- The RSS articles get a different icon so people can spot
  them -- people were finding it very hard to find them on
  the front page. The icon is one the site already used
  but with the colour changed to match the other icons.

- The RSS articles get a link to the original article from
  the front page newswire -- the text for the link is the
  name of the IMC and the title is set to the URL of the
  article so people can mouse over the link and see where
  it is. This means that people now have the option of
  directly going to the source article and not the RSS
  pulled copy.

- The RSS article pages have the "Homepage" link title
  changed to make it clear that these articles have been
  syndicated from another IMC site.

The other change that has been made since Friday is to
change the URL's of the London and Bristol feeds so that
video articles and the full article content is pulled in.  

Some things we need to decide regarding the templates:

- Do we want to do the same thing for all sites? For
  example we could remove the link to post comments on the
  articles from London and Northern because they don't
  allow comments on their sites but leave it for Scotland
  and Bristol.

- Do we want a "Submit an addition or make a quick comment
  on this article" link on RSS pulled articles? Should RSS
  pulled article be treated differently from other content
  regarding users ability to post comments and admins
  ability to promote comments to become additions?

- Do we want to have the main link on the UK front page to
  go direct to the article on the site it was first
  published on? If we do that do we also want a small link
  to the copy of the article on the UK site? Or is what we
  have now OK, with the main link to the local copy of the
  article?

Bristol are working on a RSS feed of hidden articles and
John has said that in a week or so he would have time to
add the code so that articles hidden on the source site
will be automatically hidden on the UK site.

All the best

Chris