[Seattle-editorial] [Fwd: Re: Seattle IMC code base]

[Gentry Lange]

What's this site running?

http://www.madhattersimc.org/

Their site is the bomb.

Gentry

-----Original Message-----
From: seattle-editorial-bounces at lists.indymedia.org
[mailto:seattle-editorial-bounces at lists.indymedia.org]On Behalf Of Jason
Reep
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2003 4:53 PM
To: editorial seaimc
Subject: [Seattle-editorial] [Fwd: Re: Seattle IMC code base]






-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Seattle IMC code base
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 12:50:07 -0300
From: evan <evan at protest.net>
To: Jason Reep <jasonr at speakeasy.net>

You should go down to portland if you get a chance and talk with the
techies there. They also evaluated a lot of options over a long time
and went with mir. I think they've been pretty happy with it. It's
based on java, but you don't need to know java to update the site, add
new features, change the html, create new kinds of pages, etc.... there
are a simple php like semi-programming language xml and html templates
for that stuff.... It's got a java core, but it's all configurable in a
non-java level which is easier.

The way i see it, Mir is the most powerful and flexible, but also more
technically difficult. The people who designed the template and did all
the layout for the portland site know only html and a little php, they
do not know any java and were able to make the new site look exactly
how they wanted it (like the old one. ) Most of mir's support happens
on irc with #mir and i've found the support be quite good. The
documentation for mir is not as good as the others, but there is a new
push by people just working on documentation.

SFactive is in php, it's a medium technical level. It's got a very good
basic design, but only a few people have gone very far with changing
the design. I'd say that for a basic imc site, sfactive is the most
logical migration path from active. It's got the most things which just
work like you'd think. If you want continuity then go with sfactive.
The support is at times good, and at times quite bad. The documentation
created by blicero is very good.

Dada is best for the lest technical imc's. I used it in Cancun, and
there were some features i loved, and a bunch of stuff i hated. The
best feature (which is coming in both sfactive and mir) is the ability
for users to edit their own articles. There were MANY people to
complained about it and tried to convince the techies to switch to
another system up through the protests. It's default design is very
ugly. Some imc's such as sweden, barcelona, and DC have some css
(cascading style sheets) wizards and have made their systems pretty.
There are not templates in Dada, so serious design changes are
impossible.  The data community tends to be quite separate from the
rest of the imc-tech community and with the exception of the techies
from the DC imc, there is almost no regular communication between the
two groups. Support on the mailinglist is pretty good.

the best think you could do is talk to portland, folks in san francisco
who are developing sfactive, and the dc imc which switched to dada a
few months ago.

in solidarity,
evan

On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 12:23  PM, Jason Reep wrote:

>
>
> Hey ya'll
>
> i'm writing because we I would really like some objective opinions 
> about the different code base options that we are trying to choose 
> among.
>
> the winds of local opinion are blowing towards SFActive.  I'm a little 
> unsure that this is the right way to go but am not sure if I should 
> argue over it.
>
> I like all three of the biggies:  MIR, DADA, SFActive but I think we 
> should have whichever is going to be a) easiest for non-techies to 
> work with and b) most easily supportable by moderately knowledgable 
> local techies in communication with more deeply knowledged possibly 
> non-local techies.
>
> I guess I'm leaning towards dada because I think there may be more 
> folks around here with some php as opposed to java (mir).
>
> thanks, Jason
>



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