Using Drupal as an Indymedia outlet. A kind of state of the site. Shared here for comments.

I posted this to my site, but I'm one of the only techies so I figured that I might get some positive suggestions from people on the drupal.org forums.

Hello people who check out the IMC site on regular basis.
This is the resident tech Robbt and I want to share a little bit about the plans and obstacles I've experienced developing this site and look for some feedback, much of it may be too technical without some understanding of Drupal.org and CSS but I'm sharing it regardless.

Let me just break down this issues we are currently experiencing as a site that need to be addressed, I attempted to install the project module but it failed to initialize properly.

The basic SITE.

We are running Drupal 4.7beta6, this is development code. It isn't bugfree and in fact some of the problems people have experienced in the site are due to this, such as the dissapearing links on the right and top. Where did subscribe go ? I could update to the latest CVS version and resolve some of this but I've decided to wait for the next release although updating is an option to be considered.

The way Drupal works is you have your CORE drupal code, which makes up the basis for much of the site. And then you have modules, which add features to the site.

Drupal core does such things as providing categories for content, and setting up the login and user roles, and provide the framework for theming/laying out the site.

Aspects of the site like the events calendar, images, video etc are all handled by modules which are contributed seperate from the CORE by individuals and are thus not as quality.

For some reason our database crashed last night and I've restarted it. When I restarted it anonymous people were no longer able to view the content on the main page so I changed it to point to the calendar. The reason for this is our main page or the "node" page layout is messed up. There are two problems. One is we never really decided to utilize this layout style, it just happens by default in Drupal and also there is a bug in the flexinode module which breaks off the teaser for all flexinode content after 100 characters.

I was using Flexinode for the modules although the story module would of worked out just as well. We are planning on adapting a layout that utilizes the shortened titles of newswires based upon the regions category so that local/state/national would all have their own newswires. I was utilizing the views module for this but then it turned out to be in too active of development and unable to work as I hoped it might.

We also need to figure out how we are going to regulate content. Do we have everything show up in a open newswire by default and then let editors for the site classify and categorize it in the appropriate taxonomy, this seems to be the way that Indymedia.be handles it. It seems that many time users posting content especially without logging in just leave the drop-downs in their default position and then post the content. I'm not sure how nodes could be given a default term from a category and then have it changed by someone with the appropriate access control/role but this would be something to look into.

Also the multimedia aspects of the site are pretty mangled by the utilization of various modules which don't interoperate. The image module is useful but currently lacks the ability to mass import or upload files so there maybe some benefit towards switching modules to something like Acidfree which allows the importation of whole directories. This is a problem within drupal that needs to be resolved and discussed within various avenues to arrive upon a possible solution. The image module seems to offer flexibility with the Shazam Gallery being held up as a potential saviour but without the ability of users to create their own folders and the lack of integration of images into nodes the whole process is suffering.

Then we have the video module which is useful but not perfected yet. Its configuration is somewhat complex for newbies because it requires that the video be posted somewhere other than the site due to our bandwidth limitations, and the best option for us for videos is to host them on ourmedia.org/archive.org and then link to them from the video module. I need to provide an explanation of this. Also the video module lacks the ability to handle a variety of formats and it might be better to just use straight upload and handle videos as attachments to a video type. There is also the video functionality within Acidfree which I haven't tested.

This maybe confusing but that's because it is. Currently there are a lot of different ways to do the same thing within Drupal and our site is a perfect example of how clogged a site can become when various tactics are utilized without a cohesive vision holding them together, another big part of it is simply layout and theming and that's what I'll discuss next.

Theming our site is currently a mangled version of indymedia.be I was planning on duplicating their site layout using a cut-up version of their theme/front-page and incorporating it into a template based upon a highly edited phptemplate form. I was trying to use all CSS for the layouts of the 3 columns and I ended up running into a problem whereas the footer would be tossed into the middle of the site after the left column ended. I researched this for a few days and well I ended up running into a couple of sites that discussed this as a problem with CSS layouts but the one solution I found was about utilizing javascript and that didn't work out well with PHP & Drupal so I commented it out.

Now we have a broken half complete layout which is based upon someone elses CSS. I expanded the middle and played around with the side columns but overall it is an incomplete theme. It also is still dependent upon the 3 columns with large center and due to the way I set-up it up in CSS the center column is limited in width which means that you have to scroll to the right to see some things like the calendar, which is the current default view. This is obviously bad design and should be fixed but I currently don't know what steps can be done without redesigning/scrapping the template due to my hacking/experimenting in the process of developing it. Basically I've been using the site as something of a sandbox which is pretty apparent.

Another possible avenue of development is the Radio station. There appears to be a station module developed which automatically captures streams and then posts them on the site but I didn't play around with it enough to actually get it up and running properly. But it would be an awesome way to integrate Icecast. Another question that has been asked is if there is way of finding out the currently playing tracks off of the radio stream and making a scrollbar at the top.

The integration of Other Press and how to do it on the site.
Much of the content that people post on the IMC site are simply repostings of articles written elsewhere they figure others might want to read. For one this isn't independent journalism, other there are probably legal issues, but that's the way the web works.

One idea was how to integrate other media sources and kind of aggregate and also allow people to post headlines from other sites but not have it overwhelm the original content people are contributing. This seems like it'd be kind of difficult but I already created a taxonomy for original and other press, which allows people posting to categorize. What would be more desirable is for people to post little snippets and then a link to the article much in the way that Slashdot does it and then have a comment and allow others to comment so we can digest and share the news as a local community. I think this could be done by creating a custom view of certain newswires and then changing the font color to designate otherpress. Another idea was to integrate the news aggregator aspect of the site into this, and give the articles from other indymedias the favicon.ico as an icon next to it and say other independent press such as the freepress but this is a module to be developed in and of its self.

So this is the current status of the site. I might crosspost this on the Drupal site because people there would have suggestions as to how to accomplish some of these things as well as the Imc-drupal-dev list.