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One of the topics discussed during Techmeet2006 it was the idea of indymedia tech people (and others interested) adopting a cms as the 'indymedia cms'. This way everyone would work together, sharing resources and codes to bring a cms that can attend to all imc's needs. By working in cooperation.

Notes from 2006 CMS discussions

CMS Summary

Contents 1 CMS Summary 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Indymedia Evaluations 1.3 IMC-CMS Interviews 1.4 Existing Initiatives 1.5 Recommendations

Introduction

A lot of work has been done over the past year researching candidates for a new Indymedia CMS. The purpose of this summary is to provide a snapshot of all the work that has been done researching and analyzing existing Content Management Systems. The goal of that project has been to find one that fulfills our requirements document. In addition, the intent is the collate all the information about the CMS project onto one page for convenience. At the end is an attempt to break down all the data and show where we are.

Indymedia Evaluations

Our first idea for the project is that everyone involved would take a given CMS, install it, play with it, and report back how closely it meets our requirements document. You can review the report template that we used. This was coordinated on the imc-cms list and the results of it can be seen on the survey results page. Overall, this project was not as throughly completed as possible -- but it did give us good insight into the breadth of projects available.

IMC-CMS Interviews

Another part of the research we did was to send out interviews to various CMS development teams. The goal of this was not only to point-blank get technical answers about each project but also to see how responsive the development community is. You can review the proposal and interview template that we sent out. Here is a list of the responses:

1. AroundMe
2. bitweaver - Nick Palmer
3. bitweaver - Christian Fowler
4. bitweaver - Lee Bell
5. bitweaver1, bitweaver2 - Lester Caine
6. There were a number of responses for Plone: Plone - ?
7. Plone - ?
8. Plone - Martijn Pieters
9. Plone - Justin Alan Ryan
10. Plone - Martin Aspeli
11. Plone - Jon Stahl
12. IndyPlone/IndyCore
13. Drupal
14. Midgard
15. e107
16. Drupal - Michael Kominsky

As you can see, Plone wins for the most responsive developer community.

Existing Initiatives

In addition to exploring all the open source, free software CMS'es of the world, the imc-cms list has been a place to discuss existing initiatives within the Indymedia network. These are documented here:

1. Drupal: A number of IMC sites are already running Drupal and there are packages available that make it easy for IMC sites to switch over to Drupal. Worcester Activist has published extensive instructions for setting up an IMC Drupal site. Even more information was published and discussed on the imc-cms list.

1. Dispatch System: While not intended to be a CMS all on it's own, this project was discussed on the imc-cms and seems to be worth a mention.

1. www.indymedia.org.uk: The UK Indymedia site is also worth mentioning because they've been doing a lot of custom programming for their site which incorporates "Web 2.0" functionality into their application.

1. indycore: This is an Indymedia project based on Plone (formerly called IndyPlone). Dimitris from Athens Indymedia has been mostly leading the discussion about this on the imc-cms list, including this complete introduction. Joao from Brazil Tech was impressed and also contributed to the discussion. There was also a discussion about Plone's ability to scale. This project became more interesting in July, when EngageMedia announced the release of Plumi, a free software video sharing platform built on top of Plone. You can read more information about EngageMedia or Plumi.

1. Save SF-IMC!: San Francisco IMC is planning an announcement that will go out today about "Saving San Francisco IMC," under the idea that SF-IMC has been battered and bruised over the years. As part of their recovery process, they will be offering themselves as a prototype website for another CMS option, which is building something using rapid application development methods that are part of CakePHP. This idea received credibility when it was recently announced that the Mambo CMS project would be re-writing their core codebase with CakePHP -- meaning a lot of CMS-type code is going to be available to us for stealing.

Recommendations

So, we did a bunch of research and it took a while, but we got it done while also dealing with a number of server crises. So, we should be proud of ourselves, having managed the crisis without too much downtime and also making enough progress that Techmeet 2007 can substantially move forward on this project.

The recommendations of this author (Ryan from SF-IMC, Linefeed, SFCCP, etc) are that out of everything we reviewed, we are left with 3 directions in which we should go. I think we should give ourselves a timeframe, do some intensive research on each of the 3 directions, and then go with one by 1 January 2008. I think that these 3 directions are representative of various categories of options we have available to us. These directions are:

1. Drupal,
2. Plone,
3. CakePHP

These are only my recommendations. They basically could amount to nothing but it is the conclusion I came to after reviewing a year's worth of research.

Let's discuss!

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