Today Rob and I did a Courant News code sprint to get momentum building again. I did some YDN work first and then worked on finishing search functionality, while Rob focused on a new “headers” app that we’ve been brainstorming for the past week.
Multimedia
Being both an early riser and three hours ahead by virtue of time zones, I started my day working on some YDN tasks and left Courant for the afternoon. First order of business was finishing the new multimedia landing page. We’ve been without that page since launching on Courant at the beginning of the semester, and the version before was barely functionality as it was. Zeke Miller, the new Online Editor, was the driving force for the design while brainstorming and gathering feedback from the rest of the Online desk. I’m very pleased with the results, but have opened a thread over at the CoPress forums to get feedback from the wider college news community.
Search
Next on the docket was finishing the transition from Sphinx to Haystack for the Courant News search system. Sphinx was very nice, but Haystack opens new doors and fits better with the Courant News project philosophy; it allows for the use of multiple search engine backends, so that sites can use whatever is most appropriate for their situation.
For example, if a site cannot install a powerful Java system like Solr, then they can use the pure-Python Whoosh backend (which is also nice for development use). In practice, I ran into problems while trying to use the Xapian (fast C++ engine) backend and had to switch back to the resource-heavy Solr. Hopefully as Haystack and its Xapian backend mature the situation will improve.
By the end of the afternoon, I had finished implementing it in Courant and had completed the templates for the YDN search system. Please feel free to explore. I’m especially proud of the filtering options, which allowing for filtering of the query results by section, staff members, content type (article, photo, video, etc.), and date range. It makes it very easy to find specific content that you are looking for, or even to just get a broader sense of how popular a given topic is.
Solr’s relevancy engine is giving disproportionate weight to photos because they aren’t as long as articles, which is not very desirable. However, I’m still a Solr newbie and am trying to explore options for resolving that issue. Once I figure out how to do it with Solr, I’ll have to push the Haystack folks to expose any requisite functionality.
Headers App
Rob’s big project, and his first major code contribution in several months, was the implementation of an app we’ve been designing for the past few days. He’s going to write a more in-depth post, so I won’t step on his toes too much and go too deeply into it right now; essentially, it allows you to vary the display of your news site based on HTTP header values, most importantly User-Agent and Referer [sic].
The biggest example is to show a different set of templates to visitors with mobile User-Agent strings by showing them .mobile templates (using the FileExtension middleware and render() function in Courant News). You can also define a cascade of extensions, so that you only have to customize certain parts of your site if you want, and show the standard .html version elsewhere; this could be interesting if you wanted to take advantage of new HTML5 functionality in browsers (User-Agents) that support it, while not having to duplicate templates on other pages (or if you want to customize only certain pages on your mobile site for iPhone users).
It also lets you simply set extra template context variables, so that you can show special content to people coming from certain referrers (e.g., Facebook or Twitter). There are countless uses for such functionality, I’ll let you come up with your own.
You can browse the headers app in our code repository; it only requires a bit more work before we will declare it complete, hopefully that will happen in the next several days. When Rob writes his post, I’ll update with a link.
Conclusion
Today was a productive day, with 9 commits to the Courant News repository. Hopefully the pace will keep up, and once these last few features are finalized the path will be clear to begin work on Nando, which will be the real cornerstone of the Courant News platform.
