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/.
The introduction post from the project blog:
Welcome to the home of Courant News!
It all began last summer, when we came up with an idea for a startup company: an online publishing platform for college news organizations. We wanted to be a better alternative to College Publisher – a content management system for college news organizations designed by college news organizations.
We went pretty far with the idea. We worked hard for several months and invested many hours in designing, coding, and planning to market our product. However, we soon realized that we could more effectively serve the college journalism community by open sourcing our efforts.
Today represents the culmination of those efforts. We want Courant News to be the best college news CMS available. We feel that commercial solutions aren’t sufficient and other open source solutions, such as WordPress and Drupal, are excellent but too generic. All of us have worked on college newspaper websites, and we have taken that experience and applied it to the design of this system. It’s tailored specifically for the needs of a college newspaper organization.
We have already implemented many of the features you would expect – articles, issues, multimedia, comments, search – but we have much more to do. Part of our goal in opening our source was to get as many members of the community involved as possible. We have started a wiki page with projects that need a contributor to implement them. If you’re a member of the college news community who wants to help, we need you. We need programmers, we need writers, we need designers, and all other enthusiastic people in order to make Courant great.
One of the main areas we’re going to invest in over the next several months is the administration interace. As Max said a couple weeks ago, “the acronym ‘CMS’ stands for Content Management System. That implies that the purpose of the system is actual management of content…” At the same time, we will be working on improving the rest of the platform. Our goal is to work this summer in anticipation of launching the Yale Daily News on Courant in the fall.
To get more involved, you can read the documentation (or even contribute to it) or join the discussion on our Google Group. A demo site is coming soon. (Any theme designers out there?) Also, check back here or add us to your RSS reader for more updates in the near future.
We hope you’re as excited as we are for the future of Courant News and college journalism online.
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