C.M.S., an acronym for “Content Management System,” is a term that has become ubiquitous in the open source web software world. Ranging from systems that manage a small set of static pages to full-fledged “enterprise” content management solutions (ECMS) like Typo3 or Alfresco, the term “CMS” has become a catch-all term for any web software package that can produce a website. Read More…
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.
Last night I posted a cryptic job offering on Twitter, even offering to pay for the work. After getting a number of private queries for more information, I thought I’d make my request public instead of privately emailing half a dozen people.
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.
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.
Something that I’ve struggled mightily with is the trouble of recruiting technical talent for college news organizations. It appears to be a common problem, and yet I have heard few good solutions.
Today Joey Baker tweeted about a link to a blog post on the Nieman Journalism Lab which talks about the author’s vision of the future of digital news creation and utilization. One of the core concepts was the idea that a wiki would serve as an authoritative information source, to which blog or news posts would point for background while providing just new tidbits of information themselves. This reminded me of Daniel Bachhuber’s post on topical wikis on the CoPress blog a few months ago. Daniel and I had had a personal conversation about the topic, but I’m not sure I really understood it at the time.
This morning on Twitter I announced that the Yale Daily News would not be migrating to the Courant News platform this weekend as initially planned. That immediately prompted some questions about whether this meant that Courant was not going to be released until next fall when the YDN launches. The short answer: definitely not. The long answer follows.
