Introduction

During the July 2006 "techmeet" in Sao Paulo, Brazil, people from both the Mir and SF-Active dev teams got together to discuss a number of CMS-related issues. One of the main topics of discussion was a proposal for the future of the indymedia CMSes. This piece serves as an introductory text for this proposal for people who weren't present in Sao Paulo.

History

Back when it all started, in 1999, the Internet as a place for alternative news publication was still fresh: no suitable CMS existed that employed ground breaking concepts such as open publishing. So, a number of indymedia developers initiated a CMS called "Active". Since then, various additional CMSes have been developed. For instance Mir, a java based CMS originally developed for indymedia germany, but now used by dozens of indymedia sites. Or sf-active, designed for San Francisco indymedia, but now the most popular CMS for IMCs.

The current situation

The current state of the CMSes however is cause for serious concern: The development and support teams are understaffed and overworked. Requests for support usually demand most of the available resources. Because of this, little time is left for developing new features. This in turn make the projects be quite stagnant: If we look at various commercial sites offering forms of open publication, one can easily see that, technologically, we're lagging behind. Consider for instance sites such as flickr.com and youtube.com: We don't have anything to offer to our photo and video-activists that can come close to these sites (aside from the political aspects of indymedia that are obviously much different from the commercially exploitative practices of aforementioned projects).

The proposal

Given these considerations, and given the fact that over the years a wide range of free open source CMSes have come into existence, the idea has come up to radically alter the indymedia approach to content management: instead of maintaining multiple CMS systems within the network, why don't we look for an existing open source CMS that fulfills our needs?

Advantages of the proposed approach might be:

Instead of "reinventing the wheel", indymedia developers can focus on indymedia-specific features as the standard CMS features will already be available and will be maintained by the project's general developers.
We can take advantage of an existing development and releasing process, existing support infrastructure, documentation etc.
If we reduce the number of CMSes we support, knowledge and skill-sharing between maintainers of indymedia servers will be easier to accomplish. And it will be easier to move IMCs around, as issues with law enforcement agencies sometimes necessitate.
The number of CMSes used by IMCs will be reduced, which will mean the same number of people need to support fewer CMSes.

Road map

The selection, customization and transition process each will require time. It may well cost us a full year to complete it. The steps to take might roughly be as follows:

1. We will need to look for a suitable CMS:

Two lists have been defined in Sao Paulo: One for features covered by the existing CMSes (http://techmeet.sarava.org/English/CMSWhatWeHave), and another for features that are right now widely requested by various IMCs (http://techmeet.sarava.org/English/CMSWhatWeWant). It is the intention that the search for a CMS will be based on the requirements on these lists. All of the first list will have to be covered by the CMS and asmuch as possible of the second list.

CMSes should be tried out, evaluated. This should be a process that should be gone through by especially the developers and the sys admins, as these people will be the ones supporting it and writing customizations for it.

2. Once the CMS has been chosen, a development process should be set up for the indymedia developers to write the necessary customizations and conversion scripts.

3. Then a conversion roadmap should be constructed, so that all indymedia sites can conveniently switch to the new CMS.

Concrete steps

To set this project in motion, we will call for am irc meeting, in the #cms channel on irc.indymedia.org (http://chat.indymedia.org/?chans=cms) on september 10th, 1700 UTC. During this meeting, we will:

a. finalize the requirements lists b. compile a list of candidate cmses c. divide them across people willing to help in the selection process d. fix a date for reports on the various cmses

Some concluding remarks

An idea such as this may be considered a bit controversial: a lot of developers have spent considerable amounts of their spare time to put into the various CMSes. However, indymedia CMS developers would agree that the current situation is hardly sustainable. If we want to get out of this, using an existing CMS outside of indymedia would seem to be an obvious appproach. The indymedia CMSes have been very important to Indymedia, but we have changed, and the world has changed: it would be good to re-align our approach.

Having said this, it is important to recognize that the people doing the hard labor are the ones behind this proposal. We will go through with this to release us from the heavy load we have been carrying for so long. We ofcourse can't assume everyone will support this plan, but we will also not let us be forced to continue the death march we're on.

CMSProposal