[Seattle-editorial] Technical Changes Discussed At Editorial Meeting

[Laury]

Hi All  --

In our last editorial meeting, we agreed that we needed some changes on 
the website.  An unforeseen result of the MIR Content Management System 
  (CMS) is that editorial can't make some basic layout or content 
changes without the assistance of the technical staff.  This would be 
less of an issue if we had a sizable technical team. Since our current 
tech support is neutral about which CMS we use,  I suggested that we 
look at another open source CMS -- perhaps a PHP system -- that would 
have less of a learning curve than MIR/Java.  PHP is wildly popular in 
the open source community, so we may be able to lure more tech 
volunteers and take advantage of the thousands of scripts that have 
already been written.

The editorial team has a relatively long "wish list" of changes, and it 
is reasonable to look at whether we should try to develop within MIR -- 
or use someone else's proven code.

While surfing the NYC I discovered that they are using PHP.  I also 
noted that they have implemented a few of the policy/procedural changes 
that we have discussed in the last few meetings, i.e.:

1.  They have posted a clear Editorial Policy on newswire and feature 
submission:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/mod/info/display/editorial_policy/index.php

2. They have established logins to permit users to post/edit their 
comments, create filters and rate other posts:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/mod/info/display/howto/index.php

Note how they are using their user rating system to control what 
newswire items display on the home page:

"While browsing the site, you are encouraged to rate articles using the 
popup menu at the end of each piece. While user ratings cannot remove 
an article from the site completely, they serve the invaluable role of 
deciding how much prominence is given to the display of an article.

"By default, only articles rated higher than -6 are displayed in the 
right-hand column, and on the "newswire" home page. This is called the 
"display threshold." If you have created a user account, you can even 
alter that threshold to suit your own needs, e.g., display only 
articles receiving +3 or higher. Articles which fall below the 
threshold are moved to the hidden articles section, which is linked 
from the bottom of the newswire column. They are still available on the 
site, and can be linked to directly, but their prominence is degraded 
as a result of user input."

3.  They have also implemented a pulldown menu that permits users to 
categorize their posts into topics.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/index.php?function=publish

I was very interested in how they authenticate the authors:

A.  authors with logins can later edit their posts
B. authors are asked to provide an email address for validation 
purposes.  This is optional, however, the form clearly states:  "If you 
do not validate, users will be encouraged to distrust your 
information."

4.  I was also impressed with the sorting capability on the home page:  
readers can sort by type of article (feature, newswire, etc.) or by 
political category.  The Open News section is hardcoded to bump Local 
Interest items to the top:

http://nyc.indymedia.org/

Does anyone have connections with the NYC team?  We may not have the 
volume that NYC has, but they seem to have resolved the site issues 
that we have been discussing for the last few months.  If we could 
leverage their code, it would save us hours of development time.

-- Laury
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