Max Cutler

It’s finally time, we are open­ing up the Courant News project to the world. It may not be ready for use imme­di­ately, but it’s ready for your involve­ment. So please, join us. http://www.courantnews.com/.

The intro­duc­tion post from the project blog:

Wel­come to the home of Courant News!

It all began last sum­mer, when we came up with an idea for a startup com­pany: an online pub­lish­ing plat­form for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions. We wanted to be a bet­ter alter­na­tive to Col­lege Pub­lisher — a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions designed by col­lege news organizations.

We went pretty far with the idea. We worked hard for sev­eral months and invested many hours in design­ing, cod­ing, and plan­ning to mar­ket our prod­uct. How­ever, we soon real­ized that we could more effec­tively serve the col­lege jour­nal­ism com­mu­nity by open sourc­ing our efforts.

Today rep­re­sents the cul­mi­na­tion of those efforts. We want Courant News to be the best col­lege news CMS avail­able. We feel that com­mer­cial solu­tions aren’t suf­fi­cient and other open source solu­tions, such as Word­press and Dru­pal, are excel­lent but too generic. All of us have worked on col­lege news­pa­per web­sites, and we have taken that expe­ri­ence and applied it to the design of this sys­tem. It’s tai­lored specif­i­cally for the needs of a col­lege news­pa­per organization.

We have already imple­mented many of the fea­tures you would expect — arti­cles, issues, mul­ti­me­dia, com­ments, search — but we have much more to do. Part of our goal in open­ing our source was to get as many mem­bers of the com­mu­nity involved as pos­si­ble. We have started a wiki page with projects that need a con­trib­u­tor to imple­ment them. If you’re a mem­ber of the col­lege news com­mu­nity who wants to help, we need you. We need pro­gram­mers, we need writ­ers, we need design­ers, and all other enthu­si­as­tic peo­ple in order to make Courant great.

One of the main areas we’re going to invest in over the next sev­eral months is the admin­is­tra­tion inter­ace. As Max said a cou­ple weeks ago, “the acronym ‘CMS’ stands for Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. That implies that the pur­pose of the sys­tem is actual man­age­ment of con­tent…” At the same time, we will be work­ing on improv­ing the rest of the plat­form. Our goal is to work this sum­mer in antic­i­pa­tion of launch­ing the Yale Daily News on Courant in the fall.

To get more involved, you can read the doc­u­men­ta­tion (or even con­tribute to it) or join the dis­cus­sion on our Google Group. A demo site is com­ing soon. (Any theme design­ers out there?) Also, check back here or add us to your RSS reader for more updates in the near future.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for the future of Courant News and col­lege jour­nal­ism online.

Robert Baskin

Max Cut­ler

Paul O’Shannessy