To Do list

UK IMC has now migrated to Mir. But there is still a lot of things to do on the actual Mir site. This page is meant to be a space to list problems to solve, agreed tasks to complete.

Please use UkMirWishList to put suggestions and funtionality ideas to implement on the site. Note this page was previously used for these and some may yet to move.

The UK Mir Templates project on codecoop.org has a bug tracker and a feature request tracker and we should probably diplicate the things here on that system.

Problems to solve

• manually add older 'major reports' by adding a new article in admin, setting the old date and select as archived-action. This is loads of copy-paste's so write a step-by-step instruction (started on 20 Sep 03 in UkStaticArchive). Also search and replace for new URLs to newswire articles, (id no should be same) ditto for older world-archive.
  • Done for Scotland and yet to do for Manchester sub page features.
• timezone fix
• search engine fix

In this context we should also think about how to structure the former "special pages" from stallman- if we could have them as continously updated topic pages also used in future; example: Zapatista page. Might be suitable e.g. for Iraq War and Palestine Crisis.

Timezone1: to backdate features, the date you put in is jumping sometimes a day before or after the date you wanted to put in and intended to use. This is a bug which needs to be fixed.

I think it jumps to day before eg if you put in 2000-09-27 it goes to 2000-09-26 23:00 -- SB

done? Timezone2: to arrange features on the frontpage how you want it, at global days of action you might also need to edit the time additonally to the date. This doesn't work so far and needs to be fixed.

Search engine fix:

• The image search needs to be possible by numbers. done (in admin side)
• Also the links on the original stallman features to links on stallman articles need to be transformed into links on the new appropriate server.
• Search does sometimes give you 400 hits, but displays only 20- implying difficulties to link to old article for research.

Decisions made that need implement

see the decisions taken at the Sheffield network meeting, Oct 2003, UkNetworkMeetings3

• Block possibility of promoting newswire article into any middle column - or look at dutch function to duplicate postings (mail).
• create a uk topic on the same technical level as the regional topics (regions).
• Each posting to show, both in viewer and admin sides, to which region it refers. Ana thinks best by showing which local boxes are ticked. Vince says it could show the regions and the topics selected for each article in the newswires, next to the date published and number of comments, and at the top of each article when you read it (some sort of navigation bar of where you are in the site, like in this wiki below the title of the page)
• Colour coding in the admin view to indicate which article has been monitored, which hasn't, and which is hidden.

Suggestions and ideas to implement

Content-wise:

• separation of newswire articles in regions in the admin section, so that people from a region can clean their own newswire without having to scan the whole uk newswire (and uk people not in any regional collective will only have to clean articles not posted to any particular region)
• copying all the reports from the actual uk site to different actions/2001, actions/2002 etc. topics
• Remove NoWarF15 and other pass actions from publish form ( at moment it shows 2003 actions (in flux as 2003 replace by 2004 but some want 2003 back but maybe add link to static archive page )
• 'archived' actions without options to add a comment
• anchoring comments, so it has a URL and it is possible to link to specific comments
• make 'homepage' url in db show in comments as bug now means it does not show (showing email instead??)

Media-related:

• setting up realmedia streaming server
• clickable thumbnails in articles instead of the original file size which very often is much bigger than the article width and several big pictures will take very long to load (for an example see http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/06/71045.html ). if we do that, how large should that thumbnail be? example on http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/06/266237.shtml
• on thumbnails: can the preview thumbnail in the newswire be a link to the article?
• picture upload takes ages
• video upload is temperamental and does not work

It does often work but one has to wait and first time a page generates the video link is incorrect adding a comment allows the page to regenerate with it corrected.

Also may be good with realmedia to have a http:// link in addition to a rtsp:// link for downing loading to disk. --sb

• audio: uploading ogg files doesn't work ( maybe fixed by adding ogg to mime type file, will be in new apache default one ) code to help with this done as seen on mir coders list.

Layout:

• have a minimalistic pre- setup layout and pages for new regional collectives
• make the front page less grey
• change stylesheet for the World section
• relative rather than fixed fonts as suggested in email??
• add a print icon/button to articles that produces the article without layout, suitable for printing

Admin:

• make viewallposts an 'admin light' page - this is done - still to do the 'admin' elements; ie give the option to hide / hide (repeated) / unhide with a login and password field - ideally with an internal comment field that has to be filled in (otherwise admin wouldn't be accepted) - that would eliminate the need to notify the features list.
• in viewallpost the comments are not shown - would be desirable.
• add to the viewallposts page both showing and hidden comments --- something similar done
• make it clearer for admin users to enqueue changes by replacing the 'generate all new' with 'enqueue all topics' / 'enqueue all actions' / 'enqueue all regions'
• split topics, old actions, recent actions in admin tick box section make finding easier.
• currently 2 identical logins allowed. I.e. 2 different people login as 'rob'. should not happen.

Backend:

• document and maybe revise / optimise the cron / automatic jobs which make producer to generate the feature archive, newswire archive, regional feature archive, regional newswire archive, and same for topics etc.
• Rss syndication feeds from subpage features. UkMirRss

Publish:

• simplify the upload form, too much text on top. suggestion of a pop-up window as proposed by Paul are not universally liked though, see Frank's mail
• more on the upload form: explain more clearly that 2 regions, 3 issues and 1 action can be selected not more. to disable clicking on a 3rd regions if 2 are selected would require some javascripting.
• a unwrap text button for people who paste text in from emails with line breaks, or use text2html
• check HTML for hostile code so allow HTML posting
• autoconvert out of place characters, odd quotes used when copy and pasting from MSWord. ( cleartext ? )

Miscellaneous:

• templates and pages for the list of regions, list of topics and list of actions
• and maybe add as well how many people have commented on each article
• be able to see what topic/action selected from search menu ( so don't go into twice when doing back selecting )
• show as well all showing and hidden comments in viewallposts

-- created the list - SocieteLibre - 18 Jun 2003

-- added to the list - AndiE - 18 Jun 2003

-- added some stuff from zapata - SocieteLibre - 18 Jun 2003

-- removed stuff done - SocieteLibre - 19 Jun 2003

-- added some stuff, and updated elsewhere -- SpaceBunny - 23 Jul 2003

-- added some more points, explained stuff a bit more practically and intend to sort issues thematically -- AnarchoBabe - 08 Sep 2003

-- put some 'done' words with things i thought were done - didn't want to delte anything, don'e feel sure enough. AnaPena - 23 Oct 2003

-- added decisions made need implement -- AnaPena - 03 Nov 2003 and deleted things that have been implemented - users that create uers

-- IonNec - 11 Nov 2003 added links to sheff mtg summary

-- SocieteLibre - 09 Mar 2004 added a few things to implement and improved the layout
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