[imc-uk-emergency] Lot of new stuff done...

[Vincent Bouchard]

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First, sorry about this very long email... had many technical things to say, 
unfortunately the indymedia lists are down so it goes to the emergency 
list... :-)

Ok I've done a lot of new stuff on uktest tonight, according to Chris's 
comments about the portland site and other ideas.

First, there are now three sections: regions, issues (thematic topics) and 
actions. "Actions" are the former "Major Reports", but they now form a 
different section than topics. We thought that it would be better because 
then we can see the different events on the front page (see 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en ), for example for now "May Day 2003" and 
"Evian G8". Like the topics pages, if you click on May Day, you reach a topic 
startpage including features and newswire articles talking about May Day, and 
you can access with "More Features" and "Newswire archive" the archives of 
articles about May Day. To add a topic in the action section, just set 
archiv_url at "action" in the admin section. Again, there are also 
corresponding regional pages. For example, from the oxford page 
(http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/region/oxford ), you can access the May Day 
Oxford page that gives only the features and newswire articles talking about 
May Day *and* from Oxford (from the Oxford database), and also access the 
features and newswire Oxford May Day archives. So the regional sites are 
again completely independent for the action subsection (actually technically 
the action and the issue subsections are equivalent, they are generated from 
the same templates, topicpage.template, topicnewswirearchive.template and 
topicfeaturearchive.template). If you don't like this idea (which comes from 
the Portland site, http://portland.indymedia.org ), it is always possible to 
go back, but I personnally thought it was important to separate the events 
from the thematic topics since it is not the same thing after all... :-)

But more importantly is that all the links have changed now. Because we now 
have issues, regions and actions, I thought that it was important to 
differentiate between the urls of these sections (like they do in portland). 
So now, the regional urls are *not* anymore 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/oxford, but rather 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/region/oxford. Also, for an issue, it is 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/issue/indymedia , and for an action 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/action/mayday . For a regional issue, it would 
be for example http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/region/oxford/issue/indymedia, 
and accordingly for a regional action. I think it makes the distinction 
between regions, issues and actions much clearer. The UK templates and the 
Oxford templates have now all the links according to these new urls. So 
please don't use the old urls, because you'll be confused since these pages 
are not updated anymore! (so be careful not to use 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/sheffield but rather 
http://uktest.indymedia.de/en/region/sheffield since it is the updated one 
and the other one will not be generated anymore). Again if you think it was 
better before we can go back... Anyway I suppose that the regions will use 
http://region.indymedia.org.uk for their urls, so we will have to redirect 
all that later.  

I also commented out the functions "print as pdf" and "email this article" 
since they didn't work. Zapata (a Mir coder) told me it wasn't hard to make 
them work, so I suppose when he has time we can arrange them, but it's not a 
big deal and we don't need them to launch the site. Also I commented out the 
G8 call banner, since it wasn't linked to anything... If someone knows what 
this banner is supposed to be linked too we can put it back... :-)

I also cleaned all the oxford templates and replaced all the "oxford" with 
"${region.filename}" (actually I couldn't replace all of them because it 
didn't work in the <include> functions). However, what it means is that we 
can now copy the whole oxford subdirectory to any other region and this other 
regional setup is complete. It is then sufficient for them to change the 
stylesheet to modify the layout of all their regional pages. So I suppose we 
should ask clearly which region is ready to be online, and if they are, we 
copy the oxford subdirectory to their region and ask them to customize the 
stylesheet if they want (with our help indeed to explain how the stylesheet 
works...).

I also thought about something: as it was proposed, the World section should 
be separated in some sort from the regions. I thought it could be grouped 
with an "opinion" or "lifestyle" section, where we put the articles that are 
non-news but opinions, and an "announcement" section, i.e. the article types 
we didn't know what to do with. Then we would have as article types: 
newswire, features (features that can be regional but that also appear on the 
uk page), topic-special, startpage-special, public thrash, Pre-MIR features 
(couldn't it be only features?), and regional features (regional features 
that do not appear on the uk page, so for the very local stuff). Then we 
would also have a fourth type of topics, I don't know how to call it, that 
would include world, opinions (lifestyle, non-news stuff), announcements, and 
other stuff that are not issues, neither actions, neither regions of UK. So 
people that publish on the newswire could select their article to be an 
opinion, an announcement or a world stuff, and we could exclude from the 
front page newswire the postings classified as announcements and opinions (or 
maybe not, maybe also exclude the world announcements to remove the global 
spam), they would go directly in these sections. Technically it is quite easy 
to do I think. I don't know what you think about it... am not sure myself... 
:-)

So I think the whole site is almost ready to be online. The remaining tasks 
before the launch: we have to arrange some stuff on the publish pages, but we 
have to wait for zapata to put his new codes (he should do that this week he 
said). We also have to set up the RSS feeds and redirect the urls (with the 
help of the script zapata is supposed to have.. :-) ), finish the static 
documents and put them online, decide which regions are ready to be online 
and copy the oxford files to their subdirectory (or let them do their own 
layout from scratch but no one seems to be working on that now apart from 
sheffield), and finish the design of the uk site (banner and colors). Also we 
have to decide finally the open publishing system we use and set it up, which 
shouldn't be too complicated technically (if we use the dutch system we only 
have to create a public thrash, everything else is already set up I think). 
There is of course a lot of other specific stuff to do (for example improve 
the search function, ...), but I don't think they are necessary for the 
launch.

Finally, to ionnek, the publish button is on the right on the startpage! I put 
it on the left of all the other pages because there are no right column and I 
thought it was important that the publish button be on all the pages, but we 
can remove it from all these pages if you prefer. But on any pages where 
there is a newswire (i.e. a right column), the publish button is above it on 
the right. Is this fine?

I also agree that most of the decisions should be taken after the launch when 
we have a face-to-face network meeting and people know how Mir works, how the 
site looks like and all. Then it will be easy to discuss concrete stuff about 
it and improve and change everything as the United Kollektives decide.

ok am going to bed now, sorry about this long email! :-)

ciao

vince

- -- 
In the 1960s, a student at Harvard Law School addressed parents and alumni 
with these words:

The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with 
students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our 
country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in 
danger. Yes! danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without 
law and order our nation cannot survive.

There was prolonged applause. When the applause died down, the student quietly 
told his listeners: "These words were spoken in 1932 by Adolf Hitler."

from Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence

ZOMBIE - Zone Ouverte de Mobilisation pour Briser les Inégalités et Exclusions

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