Hi everyone: I'm hoping to get some insight from some of the more experienced Cake developers on this list. First, forgive my verbosity but I want to give some background (if you don't want to read all this, you can skip down to the section marked QUESTIONS ... I'd definitely appreciate as much feedback as possible):
You may or may not be aware of a web+offline international network called Indymedia.org, or Independent Media Center (IMC). IMC went online in 1999 with an open publishing site for news, audio, video, etc while most of the corporate internet world was still looking for the next "portal" to fund, unaware of the imminent collapse of the dot- com bubble. IMC played a central role in the 1999 "Battle of Seattle," where hundred of thousands of protesters shut down a WTO meeting while riot police in armored vehicles covered the city in tear gas and random beatings. While this was happening, the Seattle IMC office provided computers running free software for people to immediately publish photos, video, audio and text of what was happening. The IMC coverage was more thorough, more exciting and, in many ways, more truthful than the corporate media coverage of what was happening. The shutdown of Seattle was front-page news all over the world for 2-3 days and the IMC was born. Indymedia began to grow to other cities and, as one of the first "Web 2.0" sites, it experienced massive worldwide growth while an international movement against neoliberal government policies grew with it. This included: riots during the Democratic National Convention in LA, riots during the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, the "War of Gas" riots against the FTAA in Quebec City in 2001, the repeated overthrow of the Argentine government during the IMF crisis riots in 2001, and it kept gaining momentum up to the million-person protest against the G8 Summit in Genoa (Italy), where street fighting between protesters and the police resulted in the shooting death of one protester. Shortly after, 9-11 happened and as it became clear that Bush was going to war with Iraq under false pretenses, a historical precedent was set as Indymedia spent 6 months covering the first war to be protested all over the world before it even started. IMC continued to grow and there are now well over 170 local IMC groups in all parts of the world. In some countries, especially in Latin America where right-wing elites have controlled the mainstream media since the military dictatorships of the 20th century, IMC sustains enormous traffic as a popular and participatory news website. An international group of programmers & sysadmins have struggled to keep up with supporting these websites and their evolving needs, traffic spikes during special events, DDOS attacks from right- wing groups, etc. Unfortunately, during the past 4-5 years, as millions of dollars have been poured into development of commercial Web 2.0 sites, Indymedia has lost its innovative technological edge. Our mistake was developing our own CMS codebases. There are 2 main IMC codebases: Mir (Java) and SF-Active (PHP). Each local IMC runs one of these codebases, although there are a few other smaller ones and some IMC's are experimenting with using Drupal. Nonetheless, our software has not kept up with the incredible user interfaces that have been created for user-generated media & content at sites like Flickr, etc. It just became too much work to continue innovating the code while also maintaining server maintenance and user support, especially since our tech volunteers were spread out between 2 projects. In July 2006, an Indymedia developers summit (techmeet.org) was held in São Paulo, Brazil. A couple dozen IMC organizers as well as the core programmers for Mir and SF-Active got together face-to-face to discuss this problem. At that summit, we decided to: 1) Merge the 2 development teams into one and work on one project, 2) Find an existing CMS with a large and vibrant developer community and participate in their development, while adapting their code to our own particular requirements, 3) Develop an innovative and distributed architecture for hosting IMC sites, breaking from the traditional webserver connected to a db server. So, we set out evaluating existing CMS'es and developing our architecture. (In the meantime, we had to continue supporting the existing sites, we lost one of our major server donors, etc) Two years later, we are about ready to build a proof-of-concept prototype of an extremely innovative and distributed architecture -- it's a 3-tiered approach that solves all of our problems. In a nutshell, each tier will have as many servers as we can get for it (even a DSL line w/static IP address can participate) and this network will collectively run all the IMC sites. We have a DB tier (MySQL), a middleware/objectstore/caching/dispatching tier (running ICE) and a front-end web tier that will host the user-facing web application. This architecture is described in more detail at http://dev.bunke.indymedia.org/ and http://www.techmeet.org/ At any rate, thank you if you've read this far -- I'm sure I'd get more responses if I'd have been brief but I wanted to give sufficient background to get the best information. I'm here seeking info for our front-end web tier. Many of us have used CakePHP for various other projects and we agree that it meets our requirements: it allows rapid application development while maintaining a clean, MVC layout; it delivers everything that's good about Ruby on Rails except with PHP, which we see as superior to Ruby because its scalability is proven and the developer pool is much larger; and, there is a large and active development community that is constantly creating reusable components that would be a resource for us. We fully anticipate to be a resource for CakePHP, as well. Indymedia, as an organization, is officially committed to supporting free software so all the code we write is free and contributed back to the community. When I heard that Mambo CMS was porting to CakePHP, I -really- flipped out! Here was a full-featured CMS that would be using CakePHP and that's exactly what we wanted. However, it's disappointing that the Mambo development timeline for moving to CakePHP is a little bit short of forever. There doesn't even appear to be a target date. So, that's not going to work for us. And we really, really don't want to make the mistake of writing our own CMS from scratch again -- although, it would be a little less painful since we'd be using CakePHP instead of our own isolated code. QUESTIONS ------------------- So, this finally brings me to my questions: 1- Is anyone in contact with the Mambo team or -from- the Mambo team on this list? Is there a timetable set? 2- Is the Mambo migration process even started (we could contribute resources to make the migration go much faster!)? 3- Is anyone aware of other CMS'es built with CakePHP that have a sizable development community or a bright future? Of course, I'm going to check out CakeForge but I'd like to hear from any developers on this list who are actually involved in the projects. 4- For anyone intimately familiar with CakeForge and available code snippets, how likely is it that we could minimize writing code from scratch by piecing together snippets of code that would go into a CMS- type application? 5- Does anybody have any other ideas or information that could help us accelerate this process, given all the background I've given? GETTING INVOLVED -------------------------------- Finally, I want to make a call out to sympathetic CakePHP developers who would be interested in helping us on this project. Indymedia is definitely a leftist project and you can read more about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indymedia You can also find more general info at our global wiki - http://docs.indymedia.org/ To get involved specifically with this project, you can: 1) Sign up for the CakePHP development list at http://mail.linefeed.org/lists/listinfo/cake 2) Sign up for the general imc-cms development list at http://lists.indymedia.org/imc-cms 3) See http://dev.bunke.indymedia.org/ 4) See http://www.techmeet.org/ 5) Email me Thanks for anybody who read this far ... CakePHP rocks, we want to leverage a large international community to helping build it out but we need some guidance and info to get us there. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide the info we need. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
