For those who read through the Courant News documentation, you might have noticed that to customize articles we created a model inheritance system. However, upon further reflection, we feel that this is not the right approach for many reasons, and have devised a new system.
The past few days, my father and I went down to Orlando to see the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch into space on mission STS-125, the final repair mission to the Hubble space telescope. We managed to snag tickets to watch the launch from the closet point open to the public, the NASA Causeway about 5 miles from the Pad 39A complex. Following are my pictures from the launch and from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, as well as my reaction to the launch itself.
As with the news industry at large, I get the sense that there are really two camps in the world of college news: the one that has existed for decades, and a newly emerging one which is pushing the definition of college journalism in the online realm. This post was inspired by a session I attended last weekend at BCNI Philly and a recent post by College Publisher in response to the activities of CoPress and others helping move college news orgs to open source solutions like WordPress.
Courant News was finally open sourced this past weekend while I was attending BCNI Philly. That included the code, documentation, and the opening of the project wiki and mailing list. While we’ve had a healthy number of people look at the site according to our analytics and logs, we’ve not really had any contributions from outside the original team yet. Granted, it’s only been four days, but I thought I’d help streamline the process of finding a way to contribute.
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/.
“Created documentation for ‘get’ template tag.” Such a simple commit message, almost innocuous. But to get there, it took a full day of work writing, plus weeks and months creating the code to write about. The ‘get’ template tag is one of the more important components of Courant News, and is something relatively unique (to our knowledge). It allows template authors to fetch their content from templates without having to write any code (Python or otherwise), maintaining the logic-design boundary in Django templates.
As we will be opening doors to the Courant News code this week, I thought I would take a moment to address expectations that people might or might not have regarding the project.
I’ve been working all day on making the installation script for Courant, and am now writing the documentation files. So I thought I’d take a few minutes to summarize the process in anticipation of release in the coming week.
Today’s post is about the optional use of issues in Courant News. I was originally going to write about articles, but the Flyers game went long and I’m running out of time in the day to do due justice to that topic. That will hopefully be tomorrow’s post, but now on to issues.
Unfortunately there won’t be a Courant-related post today, as I’m in the process of reformatting and reinstalling everything on my laptop. Nothing terrible has happened, I just needed a clean development environment and decided it was worth a full wipe instead of trying to manually cleap up Window’s registry and paths. This laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive, so I’m going to try an install from a USB drive, or else seek an external drive tomorrow. I’m going to install a new-ish (post-beta) build of Windows 7, which appears to be stable and has improved tablet functionality, which is a win for me (Thinkpad X61 tablet). I’ll make up for the off day with a post tomorrow on Articles in Courant News.