Status of Drupal for IMC platform

Installation:
The current version of Drupal is 4.7 as of this writing. It can be downloaded at drupal.org and installed on any server running PHP & MySQL with little problem. The installation process is well documented but there are a lot of variables involved in the configuration once you have it up. This document will mainly try to address these choices and present possibilities and examples from various IMCs.

Module Installation:
Once you have the core of Drupal installed you will probably want to install some modules. This is where the drupal experience can become quite confusing, exciting and time consuming. There are a wide variety of modules available for download from drupal.org, and many of them are constantly updating and adding features. Some of them duplicate functions and others hardly work. For an indymedia site to work we will want to enable a few of them at least in order to give multi-media functionality to the drupal site. Here are a few modules I'd recommend.

Audio module: This will allow people to upload their audio and has a built in flash player that allows people to upload it from the site. One of the features its currently lacking but could be getting coded at the moment is the ability to link to external audio files. This would be helpful if you are using an external file host such as archive.org or want to link to a file hosted on another IMC.

Image module: This module handles images and creates automatic thumbnails. It currently lacks mass upload capability, but there is an image publishing module.

Video module: This module will allow you to link to videos from a wide variety of sources and even creates a feed that can be used to create a videopodcast or channel that can be used in Democracy Player.

Event module: This enables you to have a calendar of events on your site. It is very functional but requires you create a content type for events.

There are a lot of other modules that could be experimented with and included in an IMC site but these 3 should enable basic functionality, the next issue that needs to be addressed is layout, content creation and categorization. This is where you can really make or break your drupal site. A improperly configured site can be very confusing and with open publishing can get really cluttered.
I have made some mistakes with the CbusImc.org site and it needs a lot of help in the clean-up department but I will discuss some of the concepts I've had and tried to implement.

Perhaps we should come up with an indymedia specific guide to modules that are essential. If anyone wants to expand upon this, feel free to edit this. I know that the views and CCK modules have a lot of potential for usage but are both under heavy development.

Categories:
This is the taxonomy module that enables all of your articles, and media to be sorted by your site.

I created a category for Scope which basically determines which newswire content is put into, rather a local, regional, national or global newswire. It seems many IMC sites have simply an open publishing newswire and then let the editorial collective choose to categorize the content properly. Many times I will have to edit content and change the newswire because people are just cross-posting their conspiracy theory/rants onto as many IMCs as they can, and they don't bother to do things like categorize it properly.

Also on the site is a category for Source, the intention behind this was to seperate original content from republished or linked material. Another thought was whether the IMC should make the site link to other sites ala slash dot rather than just cutting and pasting news articles directly from the corporate media.

I just read some documents on the docs.indymedia.org site about how to create a hidden newswire within Drupal.

I also think that a lot of Drupal sites would create a taxonomy for different categories such as labour/environment/protest/anti-globalization. We experimented with Free Tagging for this but found that many people just used it as a way to write a summary or another tag-line and didn't understand it as it was presented with the coma seperated values.

Questions about the front page, blocks, and different news wires are definently up in the air. I currently have our site set-up to display only on the front-page a taxonomy based block display which shows all articles based upon taxonomy and then when people click on content it clears away all extra blocks to show the content full screen. This was done by marking the blocks just to show up on the front-page. It might not be the best way of doing it.

A couple of ideas that never got developed because they would require some more complex coding but could be very useful for IMC sites would be to create a node type that other nodes would link under so that articles and content relating to a certain story could be found in one place. This would be useful for events specific coverage such as a protest, as well as ongoing investigations where people would want to compile data before they write an article or where people could chime in with data. This may be possible with the content creation kit as it allows, node relation as a field but I haven't explored it yet.
This would also make it easy for people to have ongoing discussions about things, link to other press articles about stories without losing the focus from creation of independent news and giving a non-corporate perspective on things.

Also important is the anonymization of drupal, this can be accomplished a few ways although the internal drupal watchdog logs can be set to expire at whatever date the actual Apache logs are what needs to be addressed.

I'd like to actually have a meeting or discuss some projects, developments and compare sites and themes for Drupal because a lot of work is dependent upon the techie configuring the site and knowing drupal unless we come up with a recipe or HOWTO get started with Drupal, because compared to many of the other IMC codebases drupal is intimidating because it is so flexible, and isn't packaged out of the box to be an IMC site. This is apparent by looking at the variety of looks and feels from current IMCs running drupal as oppossed to SF-active or Dada.

If someone else wants to try and schedule an IRC chat I will mark it on my calendar, I can be available at odd hours US-EST because it seems like many of the IMC drupal developers are in Australia.

That's all for now
Robbt with Columbus Indymedia