Max Cutler

On Octo­ber 26, 2008, the first bits were com­mit­ted to the pri­vate Courant News project repos­i­tory. At the time, Rob, Paul and I were going to offer a hosted SaaS prod­uct for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions, free­ing them from the grasps of Col­lege Pub­lisher and pro­vid­ing a sta­ble foun­da­tion for the future. In Feb­ru­ary 2009, we decided not to pur­sue the project as a busi­ness, but agreed to con­tinue devel­op­ment as an open-source project. On April 7, 2009, we opened our code to the pub­lic. After launch­ing the Yale Daily News on Courant in Sep­tem­ber 2009, we finally started to pick up steam in the past month. But after deep reflec­tion, we have decided to cease devel­op­ment of the project.

Con­text

Dur­ing the fall semes­ter we made sig­nif­i­cant progress with Courant: switched to Haystack for search, improved mul­ti­me­dia browse-ability, added the head­ers app for improved mobile and alter­na­tive ver­sions of a site, imple­mented pow­er­ful auto­mated caching bust­ing, refac­tored the staff app, added OpenX inte­gra­tion, added map­ping and basic geo func­tion­al­ity, started work on Nando, added batch upload­ing of pho­tos, and con­tin­u­ously increased performance.

But in early Jan­u­ary, Rob and I had a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion about whether it still made sense to develop Courant. Although the YDN was using it, no other devel­op­ers had joined the team, and we had doubts about the project’s long-term survivability.

Our last best hope was to con­vince the team at CoPress to help sup­port clients run­ning on Courant. I met with them at their team meet-up in Philadel­phia over MLK week­end and tried to feel out their inten­tions and plans for the next year. There was still some glim­mer of hope, and I con­sid­ered join­ing their sup­port team to make this a reality.

Two weeks later, the YDN Busi­ness and Online depart­ments hosted a con­fer­ence for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions, at which I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion about Courant. Two of the atten­dees were enthu­si­as­tic about the idea of migrat­ing to Courant, and I’ve been in talks with them in the inter­ven­ing weeks. We even wrote a CP4 to Courant data migra­tion script while work­ing on a pro­to­type instal­la­tion for one of the poten­tial partners.

The Deci­sion

Shortly there­after, CoPress decided to shut down their oper­a­tions. With­out CoPress, and with­out any other poten­tial devel­op­ers to take over the reins, we had to make a tough deci­sion: con­tinue devel­op­ing the project and poten­tially tran­si­tion these two new sites to the plat­form with­out long-term sup­port plans, or aban­don the project.

Hav­ing worked on this project for over 16 months, pour­ing count­less hours of my life into its devel­op­ment, it was an extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult deci­sion. But, in the end, I feel it would be irre­spon­si­ble to con­tinue, espe­cially know­ing that I am going to have to leave any­ways after my term at the YDN expires in October.

I’m cur­rently work­ing to tran­si­tion the YDN off of Courant to a com­mer­cial sys­tem; although the front-runner is cur­rently Elling­ton (from which Django was orig­i­nally extracted), a final deci­sion has yet to be made and it will likely be sev­eral months before I can talk pub­licly about our choice.

In the mean­time, there may be occa­sional bug fixes to Courant, but sub­stan­tial devel­op­ment of new fea­tures will not occur. We will leave the web­site and code online at least through the sum­mer, and will likely move the code to Google Code or Github before retir­ing the web­site. Please feel free to use the code, but know that we will no longer be pro­vid­ing sup­port of any form.

Con­clu­sion

Had we pur­sued grant fund­ing or other avenues of devel­op­ment, per­haps Courant could have lived up to its full poten­tial. I truly believe it could have been a major player in chang­ing the land­scape of col­lege news. I’m very proud of the work we did to cre­ate a generic and cus­tomiz­able, yet still very pow­er­ful, solu­tion tai­lored specif­i­cally to the needs of col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions. Com­po­nents like the get tag, dynamic/custom fields, the head­ers app, and the cache sys­tem are beyond the scope of most exist­ing col­lege news CMSes, and rep­re­sent months of analy­sis and plan­ning. The sys­tem was battle-tested against out­ra­geous traf­fic spikes and proved to be quite resilient. We are not the first, and will surely not be the last, team to attempt to cre­ate a new CMS option for the col­lege news world, and I wish oth­ers the best of luck.

I owe immense thanks to Rob and Paul for their con­tri­bu­tions to the project over the last 18 months; their sup­port has been invalu­able, and I hope to work with them again in the future. I also want to thank Andrew Spit­tle for his assis­tance on designs for Nando, it’s unfor­tu­nate that they never saw the light of day. Thanks to every­one who has been sup­port­ive and encour­ag­ing over the past year, espe­cially those who con­tributed to dis­cus­sions on our mail­ing list and pri­vately via email or IM.

I look for­ward to see­ing how col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions respond to the cur­rent cri­sis in the media indus­try, and I hope they learn to adapt and look for­ward instead of back­wards. My stint in the col­lege news world has been enjoy­able and a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence, but I’m ready to apply my skills to new areas of inter­est. If you need an expe­ri­enced devel­oper for your soft­ware or robot­ics project, please get in touch.