New Site (Begin 2006)

Why?

To have more "autonomia" for each collective, to make more consistent the "de facto" separation of the 3 pages (/it/, /de/, /fr/). But also a better work together, i.e. with the ability to do translation. The autonomia is to have the possibility to do the own changes to only the site of the collective.

How?

We discussed how to do that:

• [done] each collective has its own site
• [done] we will build a common page with the features of the 3 sites (i.e. like oceania.indymedia.org)
• [in progress] we will improve the collaboration of the local collectives (translation of the features)

Summary new Implementations

in short what will be the big changes?

• [in progress] splitted admin interface (in first version an admin interface that can be filtered by language)
• [done] one big common startpage which is generated from the three subpages
• handle languages for the collectives like cities on uk.indy not needed
• [done] possibility to add a translation to articles/features/etc. (except for comments) as a seperate article, so there is a new article generated which IS a translation of another article
• [done] translations are summerized in each article (that there is another translation) (done: only on startpage etc. it is missing)
• [done] maybe still a mixsite, but not having for each a seperate template => the best thing would be to have one common mixsite like the new startpage and to link from there to all other sites.
• [done] calendar for all three collectives where directly can be posted in. possibility to add translations as well! (done!)
• [done] de colelctive would like to have a more detailed comment handling (done: http://testmir.cronopios.org/de/2005/10/35616.shtml)
• [done] rss feeds for all important stuff

Discussion of new Implementations

• should articles in calendar/press archive/feature appear in the newswire? (yes and no => every colelctive handle this as they want)
• still a mixed newsire? and how? one SINGLE or still 3 multiple?
• ...

Implementation

We will do the developing work at the Test Server ng provided. More info on ImcChTestServer.

elfo and ng discussed about how actually implement the new sites. We concluded that, IF the three collectives agrees to stay on Mir, the separation of the sites will result in WORST performances and it is not really needed. In alternative we can just redesign from the bottom up the Mir workflow:

• Templates:
  • one template set per collective (so each collective can manage its own design without changing the others)
  • three "versions" of the admin page (each collective will manage it's own articles plus the Mix, Events and Translations tables => in the first version the three collectives agreed to have one common admin, but we need the ability to filter by language!)
  • we will improve the /en/ page (common) with new templates:
    • top:
      • banner
      • BIG addresses of the 3 sites (order is random!)
    • left:
      • banners from the three sites
      • search engine
      • publish button
      • others indymedia sites
    • right:
      • nothing (no newswire) or only the Mix table (without it,de,fr tables)
    • center:
      • features of the 3 collectives
      • the features will be shown in the browser's language / or if this one isn't (yet) translated in the origin language of the article.
      • other translations accessibles via a link (www.indymedia.org like)
    • language/collective sites
      • every collective has it's own site with it's own templates.
      • if an article is selected to be posted in fr it will be published to the romands collective site. if the language is an other one like the principals languages of the collectives the author have to select the collective she/he want to post the article to.
      • to every article it is possible to add a translation which will be published in the collective with this principle language. (i.e. fr -> romands), if another language is selected the articles will be posted in the same collective.
      • in the article all these translations are shown and it's possible to select other translation like on .org
    • mix sites
      • there will be still a mix sites of the collectives, so all articles can be watched at once. (will there be something like this?)
      • on this mix sites, the start site is published with the template of the given collective (like demix)
      • in the newswire the articles appear in the browsers/collectives prinipal language. if not the original language is choosed to be published as articles title.
      • if there are translations of the article this is listed in the newswire behind the title of the article. so you can directly jump to a given translation.
      • we'll have one common mix site and every article is linked to it's subpages in the collectives. this would be like the new startpage mentioned above. so why not have directly such a startpage (with a mixed newswire?) or one sub page (like the collective ones) where all together is mixed and the startpage remains newswireless, like mentioned above.
    • calendar
      • there will be one calendar for all three collectives
      • there is the posibillity to post directly in the calendar
      • like on all articles it's possible to add translation, and these go directly to the calendar of the other collective
      • entries in the calendar have a start and a end date and get sorted with this fields
      • calendar entries don't appear in the newswire (this can be up for each collective)
      • there is the possibility to have a mixed calendar
      • inlucde the radical calendar? mircoders/producers/RadicalCalendar.java
    • comments
      • chde likes to have a new comment handling for them, like: http://chris.dev.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/09/323884.html this means that we have thr categories of comments: comments, junk, hidden. comments are displayed like now. junk is displayed in a shorter way like on the given test site of chrisc and hidden articles aren't published. in the normal view you see only the comments and of the junk comments only title and author. you have a link (or can click on a junk title) to expand the junked links. if you expand them you see them expanded all in the correct position within the chronological flow of the comments. and you also get a link to see the hidden comments. if you click this link you will see the hidden comments with title and author and a banner that explains that these articles has been hidden because of the editorial policy. the hidden comments are also in correct chronological place. this would be the same like the trash_comments now, but only that you also see where the articles haven been hidden.

• Admin Page:
  • different logins for each person that bring the admin to its local admin page
  • a translations management section (maybe some syndication from translations.indymedia.org?)l, would be nice but is it needed? (thinks ng)
  • this admin page seperation isn't yet implemented and has to be implemented! uk.indymedia.org would be happy about such a feature. but this goes really deep in the MiR^? code and it can take some time to implement this.

• RSS Feeds:
  • RSS Feeds should be avaible for all wished sections: General Feature Site/Audio/Video/Images/All/Fr/De/It/Topic Pages

• Software
  • We will try to install ther server completly with GNU software: MirIsFreeSoftware

Templates

• Templates done by bak can be found here: http://bak.mir.dnsalias.net/
• Other templates: http://codecoop.org/projects/mirsimpletemp/ http://codecoop.org/projects/imc-ch/
• Hiding/Showing Comments should be possible with templates: http://uk.dev.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/09/324043.html

• Design Issues you can find here: ImcChNewSiteDesignIssues

Timetable

Suggestion for a timetable: (please note if is already done and where are the informations)

• Install the NOW of indy.ch (done see installation log)
• Merge the Current Mir of indy.ch to the CVS version of MIR 1.1 (done by ng)
• split up the tables to the new idea / merge the site to this new model OR directly do not needed
• make the new templates (started by ng)
• reorganize the producer.xml for faster production and only language specific production (started by ng)
• here maybe already a new relaunch can be done
• split the admin interface
• to be continued...

Discussion

• first discussion in #Mir and #uk about ideas

==> It is not a good idea to use 3 mirs instead of 1.

Once the admin page were "separated" by language (You could filter to see only articles published under /de/ or under /fr/ or under /it/). Now it is not the case... all in a mess.

==> UK situation:

UK uses mir as we do. Each region is a (special) topic. In the public site topics are published under topics/ while regions are published under /regions.

In the admin page they all see the whole database... there is no admin separation based on regions or languages or topics.

==> kaffe doesn't seem to be really an alternative (preformance) some more test (benchmarks) are maybe needed...

==> Conclusion:

It should be cool to have a way to separate the admin by city, region and/or, language. That would be helpful to UK too. The ability to translate articles is already there. We need the new templates (bak?).

-- NeGu - 07 Nov 2005 | added some more thoughts of how to implement the new site
-- NeGu - 26 Oct 2005 | added some install remarks
-- ElfoIndych - 12 Oct 2005 | resumed discussion
-- NeGu - 11 Oct 2005 | added wish for rss feeds and discussion
-- NeGu - 10 Oct 2005
-- ElfoIndych - 10 Oct 2005

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