Tá Indymedia ag Oscailt

Wednesday June 18, 2003 16:21

by Vinnie - IMC Ireland Tech Group

Indymedia Ireland Gets An Upgrade

After several months of hard work by the Indymedia Ireland Tech Group, the Indymedia Ireland website has been upgraded to use our newly developed codebase called Oscailt.

This software adds several much needed features to the site, such as a search engine, categorisation of stories into topics, regions, and types, the ability to publish audio and video files (although currently disabled due to diskspace and bandwidth limits), and localised frontpages for each county in Ireland and each topic.

Much new functionality has also been added on the site administration side of things, to help editors more easily edit the newswire and publish features.

We hope you like the changes, and we value your feedback. We have tried throughout the development to retain the simple interface and design which makes the site easy to use, so please let us know what you think and if you have any ideas for the future. You can do this through the contact form or by adding comments to this story

Read on to find out more details of the new features ...

Categorisation
When publishing stories you can now select what region, topic and type best suit your story. This means that when reading the newswire people can use the filter bar to narrow the wire to the area they're interested in.

Please note however that there is a vast backlog of stories which have been set to default categorisations. Some editors will be slowly trawling through this to recategorize some of them but the vast bulk will for now remain at the defaults. This means that the usefulness of the categorisation will take some time to kick in.

The process of deciding to create new categories is still up in the air , but in general the idea will be to create general categories rather than specific ones except in exceptional circumstances. If you think we need a new category please suggest it through the contact form.

Filtering
On the top of the newswire there is now a filter bar which allows you to restrict or sort what's shown on the newswire. As well as filtering by the categories mentioned above you can also filter it by media type. This means you get can get a news wire with just images instance. Also available on the filter bar is a mechansism to sort stories by the latest comments. This means that at a glance you now can see which stories, have active discussions going on in the comments section, even if they're far down the newswire.

Localised Frontpages
We now have localised frontpages, which means that for instance the link http://www.indymedia.ie/galway will bring you to a localised front page with a Galway specific newswire and features. Similarly you can do this a for all other counties. You can also do this for topics as well so, so the link http://www.indymedia.ie/irishsocialforum will give you a front page with an Irish Social Forum specific newswire and features. Also these things can be combined so the links http://www.indymedia.ie/cork/antiwar or http://www.indymedia.ie/antiwar/cork will give you you a front page specific to only both those areas.

Search Engine
With our new search engine you can pinpoint specific items on the newswire, bringing back to life all those old articles that disappeared into the wire. As well as using the search engine through the form you can build your own links using the engines functionality.

For instance if your name is bob, you can create a link to all the stories you've published over time as follows http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?author_name=bob. If you have a space in your name you should use the character %20 eg a link to all of Bob Murphy's articles would look like http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?author_name=bob%20murphy. Similarly you can do the same for other search terms such as organisations. A link to all the green party stories would look like: http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?organisation_name=green%20party. A way to search all text fields including the story content is also possible. To find all articles mentioning shannon you could use the link: http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?search_text=shannon.

All of these search fields are inexact. This means that they are case insensitive and that any fields containing more characters than the ones you specify will also match. For instance the link above to "green party" will also show articles published by "The Green Party". If you wish to get an exact match, you need to add a term similar to the field your searching for to the end of your link like &author_name_exact=on. Also if you wish to extend your link to search comments add &search_comments=on.

The Future
Now that we have a modular base to build on we should be able to easily add new features over time. One such feature will be syndication, which technically means we'll be providing an RSS XML news feed, but for the end user it'll probably mean you can hook up several of the desktop ticker programs out there. So keep an eye out for things to come!

-The Indymedia Ireland Tech Group