Indymedia London just announced that they’ll be moving to a new technical CMS and thereby plan to leave the MIR site. As York Indymedia and our little Scotland site also did before, and Bristol also reconfirmed its technical autonomy some years ago, but partly because of different reasons.
Reasons are that the site is just getting too big now, and also there seem to be difficulties maintaining it as there are too few voluntary programmers willing and able to cope with the huge workload and able to code with Java; the original system has also been modified a lot so it would be a difficult task for new people to get involved with it. The database is getting huge, too; and Scotland had to move because of DADA getting more and more faulty and trenched in spam. At the moment Drupal is pretty much in; because of the strong links with the GNU/Linux community, it is quite an adaptable solution, though they’re still seem to be some problems with video, picture and audio publishing.
Discussions and debates in the network have already focussed on providing an RSS-syndicated frontpage incorporating a lot more different groups and other alternative media and campaign sites news, but thereby changing the editorial radically as the reporting guidelines can be circumvented when syndicating content from other sites.