Tech Report February 2007

One of Post Carbon Institute’s most important missions is developing better services on our family of websites, and putting good communication and organizing tools in the hands of Local Post Carbon Groups. It’s the nature of this work that the better it’s done, the more invisible the tech team becomes. As you can see below in this report from Mack Hardy, our Technology Manager, Mack and his team have been working hard on a range of good projects. Working with Mack are Zoe Neill-St.Clair, Technical Coordinator, and Tim Whiteway, Web Support Coordinator as well as several long-term contract programmers.

Here’s Mack’s report:

Single Sign On
Developing the Single Sign On login system has been a major task. Now it is possible to use the same login username and password to access all the initiative sites. We started from open source contributions to the drupal project and adapted and improved this code to meet our needs. We will be resubmitting our improvements to the drupal community so others can benefit from our work.

List-forums
Forum mailing lists for groups is another project we have been working very hard on. Our objective is to create a mailing list per group so that users can choose to interact with the site via email, or via the web and they will have the same information. Traditional list serves are a good way to communicate, but it is hard to review the archives or help similar groups. The new list-forum software (an improvement to og2list) will give group members the option of participating in their groups via email or web, and members can receive each message or a daily digest of the forum content. The system allows for attachments and images. The system is in test now and we anticipate releasing this tool to the Relocalization Network in the coming weeks.

Global Public Media.com - converting to drupal
For the last 2 months, we have also been working to convert globalpublicmedia.com from its custom PHP backend to the drupal platform. The new Global Public Media site will allow users (signed in with the Single Sign On) to comment on articles, video and other news, as well as to vote on their favorite media items.

Relocalize.net Group Homepage Improvements
We are close to releasing several improvements to the Local Group home pages. Zoe has been coding a new Local Group menus module, which will let each group have their own menu. The menu can point to any content in the group or external to the group, and group moderators will be able to set the menu structure. Local Group homepages will now allow groups to upload their own banners for the header and additional pictures to personalize the group site. The system will also allow groups to have their own subdomains, web addresses such as http://rwbi.relocalize.net.