Demo site for Courant News

[Scott]

Hi,

I was wondering if you guys were considering setting up a
demonstration site for what a sample installation of Courant News
looks like. I'd love to install (though need to figure out how to do
it on Windows) but I'd first really love to be able to play around
with a demo site that you guys might have set up.

Thanks,
Scott


Scott Bressler
Online Editor
Student Life
www.studlife.com

[Max Cutler]

Hi Scott,

What kind of things are you looking for in the demo? As we've talked
about before, we're struggling to identify what people want to see in
a demo site installation. I have my paper, the Yale Daily News,
running on Courant on a test server, but it looks and functions
identical to the current PHP-powered version from the public's
perspective. If you mean the admin site, then it's just a stock Django
admin, which can easily be seen elsewhere on the web. Until we finish
our new admin site this summer, there's not much to show on that
front. I'd appreciate any guidance you can give.

Max

[Scott]

I just realized as reading through more of your blog posts and other
stuff online that there wouldn't be anything like that I was imagining
yet for Courant News (more along the lines of previewing a WP
template).

To answer your question, I don't really know what I'd expect in a
demo. I think I'd have to think about that more.

For now, how could I get involved in the project best? I've spent the
past two days pouring over your blogs posts, some of the
documentation, and lots of stuff on CoPress (I've been wanting to get
more involved all year but never found the time). Unfortunately, I
have no experience with Django but I'm a CS major, so the technical
side is definitely what I'm interested in.

-Scott

PS Tom Kaplan went to HS with me and we worked together on our HS
paper :)

[Max Cutler]

Scott, thanks for your response. A lot of people have asked for a
demo, yet I've had a hard time extracting exactly what people expect
from one. Until I have something really useful to show that's not in
the documentation or my blog, I'll be sure to promote it or put up a
working "demo."

With regards to how you can help, there are a number of things. If you
are a programmer (which CS major kinda presumes), picking up Python/
Django is pretty easy in my opinion. Rob and Paul, the other two
members of the core team, picked it up pretty quickly and were
committing code within a short period of starting to learn it.
Django's docs are one of the best of any open source project out
there, and there are a number of good resources for learning Django
and Python. If you need help finding them, please let me know.

Otherwise, take a look at my blog post here:
http://maxcutler.com/blog/2009/04/28/courant-news-how-to-contribute. A
key thing to do would be to read through the wiki page of project
ideas, and either add your own, write specs for some of them, or even
start implementing things and submitting patches.

If you have a news org site that might be interested in using Courant,
I'd be happy to talk to you privately to evaluate whether the project
is sufficient for your needs.

Max