[Syndication] Announcement - first public release of Oscailt 3 beta

[Chekov Feeney]

Hi folks,

(apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement, I have 
also sent it to imc-tech but it is particularly relevant to 
imc-syndication).

I will start by warning you that, having finished coding oscailt 3, I'm
now on a marketing mission.  Over the next few weeks I will be
shamelessly promoting oscailt within the network.  The aim of the
exercise is  first of all demonstrate to techies the capabilities of the
new code.  I will, in time, move onto IMC editors and introduce them to
the abilities of our content management system.  However, that's for
another day and for the moment I'm still focusing on the tech end of
things.  Perhaps I am over-confident (I have a tendency to be some might
say), but I reckon that the appropriate response to a technical
investigation of this system will be "wow" and the more you look into it
the bigger the wow will get.

Anyway, I am building a demonstration site (entirely through the user
interface with no ftp/shell access to change anything) in order to
demonstrate just why you should be excited about this.  My first
demonstration is designed to illustrate the pull syndication
capabilities of the system (with a few other things to whet your
appetites).  This demonstration can be found at
http://www.indymedia.ie/devel/syndication_demonstration  In addition to
illustrating some of the technical capabilities of the system, it
includes some of my theoretical reasoning on the current problems with
intra-network content distribution and how we can use syndication better.

Other demonstrations of increasing impressiveness will follow in the
next few weeks.  The documentation project is under way too at:
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/Oscailt  Expect it to take on shape
fairly rapidly as we can now concentrate on it rather than the coding.
A high level outline of the architecture is detailed at
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/OscailtDesignGeneral  also of
interest might be the 7 layer anti-abuse / anti-spam defence system:
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/OscailtAntiSpam  People are, of
course, encouraged to contribute to this documentation.

For those who are sufficently impressed with this demonstration and want
to see more, it is available on our sourceforge project page at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/oscailt/ to download as a zip.  It is
also available in CVS on the sourceforge project page. Note that the
install process is perhaps the easiest of any web based project that I
have ever come across, so don't be timid.

Of course there will be bugs and holes in the code still but with enough
brains we can purge any serious ones before too long.  The core metadata
engine should be fairly stable since it has been running anarkismo.net
with close to 100% uptime since May and very little technical oversight.

Shortly after the release we will be attempting to launch oscailt as a
major open source development project both within and beyond indymedia
land.  It has already started to be used by various community and
non-hierarchical organisations in Ireland and we hope that trend of
spreading outside the IMCN to accelerate with this new system.  We hope
to attract as many developers as possible and to make this an open and
dynamic non-hierarchical development project.  To that end, we put a
huge effort into designing an infrastructure that is easily expandable
and customisable.  Beyond that we have designed a meta-data layer which
aims to allow us to accumulate all the work that is put into oscailt
configurations / translations and feed it back into the system.  We feel
that the existance of such a project could be crucial in keeping the IMC
at the technical cutting edge for the future and having our own
codebase, designed expressly for our type of organisation, has many
advantages over the alternative of using general purpose CMSs such as
drupal which IMC-istas are increasingly looking towards as our own
systems fall behind in the developmental arms race.  If anybody is
interested in helping out in any way with this development, sign up to
the oscailt development list at: oscailt at lists.indymedia.org

I do not mean to be insulting towards existing IMC CMSs, and in fact I
am not very familiar with any of them. However, I have noticed some
sense of frustration with their perceived limitations in the network,
particularly the PHP based ones, and an increasing interest in non-imc
solutions as a result. I have looked a bit at the drupal architecture
and a few other similar major free software systems though and I don't
think that they are beyond us (although of course we will need to
attract developers and work on developing our modules a bit before we
can do everything they can).

Anyway, I beg your collective forgiveness for the shameless
self-promotion in this announcement.  In my defence, I have been working
on this new system for over 2 years - it took over a year and several
prototypes to design the core engine - and although I am almost
certainly over-reacting to the pleasure of having got to this point, I'm
not entirely without perspective.  I have, in the past, designed and
built fairly large international financial and telecoms services,
managed the web presences of international banking groups, designed
commercial CMS's and various other stuff like that. I know that this is
a far superior codebase in most ways and a generation ahead of all those
commercial projects in the sophistication of the architecture.

I should also say that the shameless bragging in this announcement
includes a bit of mischief.  I have wondered for a while why oscailt
hasn't had more of a take-up in the network to date considering that it
is such a solid and well engineered system.  I put some of this down to
the modesty of Vinnie, the author of oscailt 1 & 2 and one of the
authors of oscailt 3. In my experience this modesty is often the
hallmark of a good programmer. I missed out on either the modesty or the
quality gene ;-). I am also hungry for feedback and criticism and reckon
that making extravagent claims about its qualities might provide some
motivation for people to try to investigate the system and try to find
problems with it so that they can take me down a peg or two. So please
don't be afraid to be harsh in your appraisals, I have unusually thick
skin (or as we say in Ireland, I have "a neck like a jockey's
bollocks").

To sum up, it's ready, it's good, we're serious and we want you to use it.

The important URLs one more time:
http://www.indymedia.ie/devel/syndication_demonstration
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/Oscailt
https://sourceforge.net/projects/oscailt/
oscailt at lists.indymedia.org

Chekov
1 of imc.ie