Welcome to Oscailt 3: A new generation of Indymedia Software

Sunday January 29, 2006 03:42

by Indymedia Ireland Development Team - Indymedia Ireland

Indymedia Ireland Launches Oscailt 3.0 Platform As well as Indymedia Ireland's constant efforts to produce and distribute information in an open and democratic manner, we put a similar effort into creating and disseminating free software to allow others to do the same. Today, after more than 18 months of development, we finally launch version 3.0 of our Oscailt content management system.

New Features

Oscailt 3.0 has literally hundreds of new features which will progressively appear on the Irish site over the next few months. Some of the most important ones for users are the following:

Images Made Easy - Oscailt now automatically resizes all images for web-viewing - this means that you can now upload much bigger images than before.
Friendly URL's Indymedia URL's are now short and meaningful without any of the messy variables. http://www.indymedia.ie/features/dublin/anticapitalism is a new style URL - this means that search engines should give Indymedia articles an even higher ranking than now.
Lots of New Feeds: Podcasts, Comment Feeds, Atom Feeds, RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 ../feeds.more information
Lots of anti-spam / anti-troll measures Users can report any post on the site by clicking on the report post icon beside it. The ../editorial dalek has also been given some major new powers - it's hungrier than ever to exterminate those annoying trolls.
Context Sensitive headlines - every article is now accompanied by a list of headlines from the same author and with the same category - making it much easier to follow threads through our coverage of issues.
Lots of new ways to get involved - Oscailt 3 allows lots of different ways for people to get involved in indymedia Ireland - from reporting posts to managing a whole section of the site, there are more ways than ever to get involved in indymedia and help us to carry the voices of the excluded around the world!
New Multi-lingual Features Oscailt 3 allows us to manage the translation of the site into several languages easily - we will be starting to translate as much of the site as we can into Irish in the near future
A new look to the site - take a look around our newly designed site and let us know what you think!

Some Background

Oscailt has thusfar been almost entirely produced by the technical group of indymedia Ireland. It's history is very much bound up with the history of indymedia Ireland, although it is now starting to grow both within the IMC Network and elsewhere.

Oscailt was first launched on indymedia Ireland on June 18th 2003. Since then it has gone through a second generation and slowly spread around the world. Today it powers indymedia sites in far-off places like Oklahoma, Charlottesville, Virginia and some closer to home like Bristol Indymedia. Oscailt has also been translated into several foreign languages, for example, Oscailt powers Jakarta Indymedia and Denmark Indymedia.

For us, the fact that we produce our own software and distribute it for free is a very important part of Indymedia - the idea of Open Publishing owes much to the free software movement. With the development of Oscailt 3.0, the software has started to spread even further into non-indymedia sites. Although version 3.0 has not yet been fully publically released, there are already a list of sites who are using one of the beta releases to power their site. For example: Anarkismo, International Anarchist News Site and Sonidos Libertarios. Oscailt 3.0 beta versions also power the newest member of the indymedia family: Virginia Beach Indymedia as well as prospective ones like East Africa IMC

More Information

Oscailt is Licensed under the GPL. It can be downloaded from the Oscailt Sourceforge Page. The documentation for Oscailt 3 is available on the indymedia documentation wiki. The current release is numbered 3.0-rc1 - meaning that it is a 'release candidate' - we expect the full public release to take place within a few weeks.

We are always looking for more people to help out with Oscailt development and indymedia Ireland technical work - no matter what technical skills they have. To get involved, just sign up to the Oscailt Public Mailing list or the Indymedia Ireland Technical Mailing List. We are also always looking for volunteers to help out with all other aspects of the site - don't be shy Get Involved!

Please add any comments or questions that you might have about the new site or the new software