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.
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.
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.
Everyone seems to want to create the next popular CMS. Whether it’s for blogging, brochureware, e-commerce, or news, there’s no shortage of people looking to build the next big thing. I admit to being one of those people. But as I’ve been doing market research and competitive analysis for the better part of 9 months now, one thing has struck me in particular: most of these people do not truly understand why software like WordPress and Drupal have succeeded, and thus go down roads towards mediocrity and obscurity.