Courant News

Courant News: ‘Get’ Tag

“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.

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Courant News: Issues?

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.

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Courant News: Maintenance Mode

Today’s brief post will cover Courant’s maintenance mode. This mode allows authorized staff to view and perform work on the site while the rest of the world sees a simple message informing them that the site is currently unavailable. There are a number of uses for such a feature, which I will describe briefly.

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Courant News: Ads

One of the big problems with a certain popular online publishing platform for college news is that the service takes a major cut of the site’s ad revenue in return for covering the hosting and infrastructure costs. Therefore, a major appeal of moving off said platform and running your own site is that you get full control of your advertising. Today’s post is about how we handle ads in Courant News.

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The Proliferation of Registries

As I’ve discussed before, one of the core design tenets of Courant News was the ability for news orgs to customize and add on to our core platform without having to modify the code of the platform itself. While it is possible to create a cohesive platform, it is more difficult to allow outside code to hook into it without actually modifying the platform itself.

One common way, adopted by the Django built-in admin app, as well as  a number of common Django reusable apps like django-tagging and django-mptt, is that of a registry system. I’ve been joking with one of my Courant cohorts, Robert Baskin (@rsbaskin), on twitter about registries, and I thought it was time to let everyone else in on the discussion.

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Courant News: Pages

Today’s topic of discussion is static pages in Courant News. Virtually all sites have static pages of some sort, such as an About page.  Following is a brief overview of how we have handled such a common feature.

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Courant News: Media

In keeping with my attempt to do one blog post each day, today I’m going to talk about media in Courant News. One of the largest advantages of the web over print is the ability to publish virtually unlimited amounts of multimedia. Whereas articles often have at most one photograph associated with them in the print edition, we have the ability to publish all kinds of multimedia with our articles online: photos, videos, audio clips, interactive graphics, files, etc, etc.  First I’ll look at the reasons for doing this, and then specifically how Courant News handles media.

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Email Subscriptions

This week’s topic of discussion at the CoPress forums regards email subscriptions/alerts, something which I’ve given a fair amount of thought to in the past few months. Today’s post will cover how the YDN has used email subscriptions up to the present and some ideas for email handling in Courant News.

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