[Freeform-dev] Re: volunteer.indymedia.org

[C Carey]

Arc,
sorry to take so long to respond to this. It fine with me to recode the site as 
long as the upshot of it is NOT that i will have to put more work into 
maintaining the site than i am doing right now. And if you, or pref. a small 
group of people you can gather, would like to maintain it, that fine. What i 
want to avoid is disasters in the past where others have gone into the code to 
improve something about it for their own imc site (which was successful), but 
which disabled, or made considerably worse, the signups for all the other sites. 
  They tested the signup to their site, but not to anyone else's.
And cleaning up after that ended up creating a great deal more work for me than 
if they had just asked me to do it myself.
But you're suggesting a whole rewrite, and that's fine. All i ask is that you 
test the entire rewrite on your web server at home on in the sandbox on one of 
the imc servers, testing to signups for several of the sites, before you replace 
this existing site.

I've more to say, including a few things about the the server it's running on, 
that i cant post to a list. Send me a personal email for you and/or whoever else 
is interested in working on this; i'd love help, and it's also fine if you want 
to take the whole site over. i just want to be sure that the transition process 
happens without interrupting the possibility of signup up at all.

As a quick interim thing, i can add an if statement for ithaca, with a Location: 
redirector to any url you want, to passargs.php. Or you can do it. Just make 
sure the file persmissions are exactly the same after you edit as before, and 
please add a contact email and a date for that change.

i dont think i can make it back home to a computer by the time of the irc 
meeting today...

Catherine

Arc wrote:

> I've noticed that volunteer.indymedia.org hasn't been updated in quite some 
> time.  It's missing a good number of IMCs and, especially in the tech side, 
> is very Active-centric (many IMCs run codebases that don't use PHP).
>
> We (IMC-Ithaca, I speaking as tech contact) are in the process of setting up 
> our skills/signup page where prospective volunteers will be able to advertise 
> their skills to the IMC, similar to how volunteer.indymedia.org is setup.
>
> I'm writting you specifically to ask that we (IMC-Ithaca) be added to the 
> list on volunteer.indymedia.org, but this isn't a task as easy as putting our 
> name in the HTML.  We're running Freeform, which is Python-based, and our 
> local tech needs differ greatly from those tasks listed on your site.  I 
> don't want to speak for the other local WGs, but browsing through the 
> choices, I feel the same applies to them as well, and I also feel that 
> someone should be able to signup for multiple things (ie, admin and tech).
>
> My proposal is thus a redesign of the site.  I'd like to see it "fit" better 
> with the look and feel of the other IMC pages (ie, newimc, docs, etc) but 
> that's a minor issue.  The biggy is getting passargs.php3 to redirect to our 
> local IMC's volunteer page, passing the args along, so that the skills 
> they're asked to advertise are relevent to the IMC they're signing up with.
>
> I'm coding the stuff this week, so I'm flexible to the structure you have 
> already.  Ithaca, Rochester, and Central Florida are all using Freeform so 
> all three of us will be able to be setup this way (once this new code is 
> activated, if those other IMCs choose, etc).  I'm also quite willing to 
> overhaul the volunteer.indy site to support all local IMC codebases, which 
> requires more than cosmetic changes.  I know enough PHP to make the change to 
> passargs.php3 as well, for a short-term solution.
>
> Any replies sent to this address will go to the freeform developers list.  
> Thank you for your time in this matter.