Max Cutler

This morn­ing, Can Duruk (@cduruk) asked me why the code for Courant News hadn’t been released yet. I promised him a response more sub­stan­tial than what I could fit in a sin­gle tweet response.

On Feb­ru­ary 1st, the deci­sion was made with Rob and Paul, after solemn dis­cus­sions, to aban­don pur­su­ing our startup com­pany. The next day I had a talk with Daniel Bach­hu­ber (@danielbachhuber) of CoPress about whether or not there would be inter­est in our code becom­ing pub­licly avail­able. After talks with Daniel and then a con­fer­ence call with a num­ber of other folks who have made Django sys­tems for their news orga­ni­za­tions, we agreed that it would be worth pur­su­ing as an open source project.

Orig­i­nally we were just going to put our code out there under the BSD license and let peo­ple use it for their own pur­poses. How­ever, we had not yet fin­ished even our core fea­ture set, so I planned to release the code after I relaunched the YDN on the plat­form. The wait would be jus­ti­fied because I would have fin­ished the core fea­ture set while build­ing out the YDN, and thus it would be ready for con­sump­tion afterwards.

Then last week I post­poned the YDN tran­si­tion, so peo­ple began ask­ing if that meant the code release would be post­poned too. As I told some peo­ple, my cur­rent plan is to have the project site and code ready by BCNI Philly on April 25. The rea­son I don’t just dump the code now is that there are still some out­stand­ing fea­tures (which is why YDN was delayed), there is still doc­u­men­ta­tion to be writ­ten, and I still have to fin­ish the project website.

How­ever, Courant will not really be ready for actual use or con­sump­tion upon its open-source-ing. The core set of func­tion­al­ity is essen­tially com­plete, which means you can build a news web­site which func­tions well for the vis­i­tors. How­ever, we still haven’t had time to imple­ment our vision for the admin inter­face, which is really the whole point of doing a spe­cial­ized “news CMS.” It’s cur­rently just a more-or-less stock Django admin, which, while func­tional, is far from ideal and really only mar­gin­ally bet­ter than using Dru­pal with CCK or sim­i­lar options.

As I’ve said pub­licly and pri­vately in the past few days, the acronym “CMS” stands for Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. That implies that the pur­pose of the sys­tem is actual man­age­ment of con­tent, which for a web­site would be through an admin inter­face. So I claim that the most impor­tant part of a CMS is the admin inter­face, and thus I can’t con­sider Courant ready for an actual site until we’ve taken at least our first pass at a news admin­is­tra­tive interface.

I’m cur­rently in the process of writ­ing a spec for which I’d like feed­back from the com­mu­nity, and which I’ll post some­time towards the end of this week. Such doc­u­ments will even­tu­ally be part of the wiki on the Courant News project site, but I’ll find another venue until that site is ready for pub­lic con­sump­tion. I’m going to try to do one blog post a day to keep the flow of infor­ma­tion steady, so check back for more news on Courant.