back to UkMovingToMir UkMirWebDocs

Moving From Active to MIR

MIR

MIR is an Open-Source content managment system (CMS), designed to run an indymedia(type) website. Besides powering several indymedia sites, a number of progessive organizations use Mir customized for their own needs. Mir aims to provide sophisticated functionality, for example, complete multi-lingual content production, editing, administration, and presentation, while retaining the ability to be run on less than top of the line hardware through extensive static caching.

Independent Media Centers (IMC)

Many people and grassroots groups appreciate the possibility to publish on the web via the indymedia newswire - no need to register a website, deal with servers, write HTML. Equally, a large part of the maintenance work can be done with basic web-publishing skills - a few tags and pressing the right button, and getting more confident as you go along. On an international level, indymedia coders are collaborating on the constant improvement of the various code bases.

IMC UK: Migrating to a new code base

Indymedia UK started off on Mayday 2000 with a manually maintained website, then we moved on to Active. With the regionalisation of the IMC UK project, we painfully experienced the limitations of the good old Active. But it took more than a year to actually get the migration to MIR going. The day-to-day dynamics of covering actions and protests and the building of a social network had a higher priority than the rather abstract task of changing the code base. In addition, collective decision making takes a long time, and only very few of us have got their teeth into the deeper levels of coding. Also, there was no technical procedure for moving the existing database from Active to MIR, until some global techies volunteered to write the software.

Comparing Code Bases

But finally, we are migrating to MIR in May 03, and here are some reasons why (from a non-techie perspective):

Local pages: Most of the regional imc groups in the UK want to run their own local page autonomously. In Active, we can set up "subsections", i.e. middle columns with features. Maintaining a subsection, however, requires ftp - and not enough people are comfortable with it. MIR provides an easy-to-use interface for each subsection.

Newswire: With Active, Indymedia UK can only show one newswire, i.e. the complete database of postings. With MIR, we will be able to display customised views of the uk newswire database for each local imc.

Content management: In Active, many functions have to be carried out manually.

Active to Mir Migration Tools

For more detailed tech instructions on using the Mir Migration Tools see UkActiveToMirTechHowTo

---

please note: this intro was written for a non indymedia audience, from the perspective of 1 of the collective in London -- IonNec - 08 Apr 2003

added info about migration tools. it seems that this is the place for it. -- SdLotus - 05 Nov 2003

used the text by -- SdLotus in a newly created page UkActiveToMirTechHowTo -- AndiE - 07 Nov 2003