Sydney Indymedia Code Base Migration Project

Introduction

The Sydney IMC collective is currently starting up a discussion about the possibility of migrating from active-1-7-2 to another code base.

History

Someone please check and clarify this history

Sydney IMC was one of the first IMCs and active 1-7-2 was the first software to run on indymedia sites, but times have changed and so have the requirements.

The active-1-7-2 software still runs on the active sydney website which was set up before indymedia became a household name. There is talk about a merge of active sydney and sydney indymedia because there is no real point to having two newswires for the one city. You can read some of the reasons for proposing a merger here.

Essentials

What the new code base absolutely must have:

• Article Categorisation
• Easier Spamming and Troll handling

Desirables

Various members of the Sydney IMC collective would like the new code base to have the following features:

• Better region management
• better topic management
• Optional User Registration
• Sort By latest comment. As far as I know, active-1-7-2 is the only code base that provides this fantastic facility. It is an easy way to know if someone has commented on an article I wrote years ago...

Code Base Chosen By Sydney IMC

After some debate between using Drupal and Dada IMC, that final decision was taken to migrate Sydney IMC from Activer-1-7-2 to Drupal 4.5, which is the latest release.

The previous list of Indymedia codebases around the world has been moved to the IMCSydneyOtherIMCCodebases page.

Open discussion about the migration is being conducted on the imc-drupal-dev mailing list. To join this list go to the sign-up page. Archived discussion is also available here. For a summary of this info, see ImcDrupalDev.

Drupal Features and Modules

There is a core set of features that come standard with the base Drupal install. The list of these features can be found on the Drupal website here -

http://drupal.org/features

There's also a whole bunch of add-on modules that can be installed onto the base build. The full list of these modules, with a brief description, can be found here -

http://drupal.org/download

As a very initial list the following is being considered:

Article - The article module allows for articles to be organized and displayed in a centralised location.

Attached Node - The attached_node module allows users to include a reference to a node within the body of another node.

Attachment - Allows the attachment of arbitrary files to nodes.

Bookmarks - Gives users with the 'access bookmark' permission their own private bookmark block, allowing them to add any URL to the list.

captcha - Adds "captchas" to the user registration process.

Collimator - For example, collimator could be used to view the latest posts to a site. Nodes are then sorted by their last modification time in descending order.

Daily - The daily module is meant for things like comic strips or daily headlines. It offers a new node type daily that has a date associated with it.

Feature - A module that lets you organize and maintain a feature list.

Filestore2 - a completely rewritten version of filestore which stores the files on the filesystem instead of in the database.

Flexinode - Flexinode is a module that allows non-programmers to create new node types (flexible content types) in Drupal when their needs are modest.

HTMLArea - Allows Drupal to use the HTMLArea WYSIWYG formatter to replace text area fields.

Image - This module allow users with proper permissions to upload images into drupal. Thumbnails are created automaticaly.

Img_assist - Greatly simplifies the process of adding inline images to content.

mypage - Provides users with the ability to select among all your site's taxonomy terms, and then get a customized "mypage" with nodes.

News Page - Allows creation of pages which show syndicated 'news' items from an aggregator category.

Node Moderation - This module enables users to vote on nodes.

Summary - The summary module provides several options for content display on a home page in addition to the standard list of recent posts.

Syndication - Syndication.module offers a web page which centralizes all of the RSS feeds

Taxonomy Browser - Think of this as a 'build your own category view' page.

Taxonomy Menu - This module adds links to taxonomy terms to the global navigation menu.

Migration scripts

IMCSydneyMigrationScripts

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-- SeanS - 01 Sep 2004 - created
-- GarconDuMonde - 02 Sep 2004 - few more links (mostly nicked from imc-tech) and thoughts
-- SeanS - 02 Sep 2004 - added new desirable sort by latest comment
-- PhillC - 02 Sep 2004 - linked up all the codebase names from a list I found on IMC Dev
-- SeanS - 02 Sep 2004 - added a couple of brief comments to some of the codebases based on email discussions
-- SeanS - 03 Sep 2004 - expanded the history of the sydney imc codebase
-- PhillC - 29 Nov 2004 - Updated section on chosen codebase and moved older list
-- PhillC - 02 Dec 2004 - Added Drupal Features and Modules for consideration list and imc-drupal-dev mailing list

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