Lambda the Ultimate

I think he was talking specifically about the new site, as opposed to the classic forum. This way, LtU gets two birthdays every year. Definitely a round of applause! Thanks for everything!

Posted a followup under the wrong node...

And when you didn't include an "RE: link" like you often do. What bad timing!

Maybe it's time for a facelift. Surely one of our members has some exceptional graphic design skills. Or maybe just add some new Drupal themes, with a more Web 2.0-ish one as default; surely there must be thousands. I hate to say it but I think LtU is starting to look a bit dated.

And, for example, a lot of the boilerplate on the page template is outdated. Look in the footer, for example. Hack the Planet seems dead, and Daily Python-URL seems effectively dead as well. The selection of links seem rather arbitrary. Do they need to appear on every page?

And what about the left sidebar? Do "Genealogical Diagrams" and "Courses" need to appear on every page? I think these belong more on a static page of their own. I don't think a UX designer would approve of this.

I think the right sidebar is too narrow; forum topic names tend to be long so they look scrunched up. (I am using the alternate theme; dunno if it is the same on default.) Same with the left, actually: "Site operation discussions" takes three lines. I think actually LtU would be fine with a 2-column setup.

How about a snazzy custom LtU logo?

I also miss some things that are pretty standard these days, for example, Markdown for posts, and notifications of some sort when someone replies to one of my posts. Or, how about gravatar-type thingies? It would add some color, at least.

Barn raising, anyone?

It's suprising that there's no forum software written in languages that LtU folk would like to use. Or does someone know of something lovely?

Re: comment-60346:

Your question seems to presuppose that an LtU reader wouldn't want to program in PHP. As Anton pointed out before, Dries Buytaert would fit right in as an LtU member, yet he chose to develop Drupal in PHP.

You are right, and those are good links. I do not deny prudence to Drupal. Nevertheless, it is a language that fills me with despair.

There's the software that Hacker News runs on, which is implemented in Arc, which in turn is implemented in PLT Scheme (before it became Racket).

Other than that, I don't know of anything. I think the reason for that is mainly community size and focus. The PHP community is mind-bogglingly larger, and focused almost exclusively on web applications.

Take Drupal, which is just a single CMS, albeit one of the biggest. According to this community diagram, when the diagram was last updated (seems to be more than a year ago), there were 900 people with CVS accounts and 1800 people who had submitted patches in the previous year. There are at least 300,000 active installations of Drupal, and the full number is presumably much larger.

If you don't get it by then, then you are not a good enemy intel gatherer.

What's interesting is that most major PHP meetings I've been to, in New York (NYPHP), Long Island (LIPHP), and Boston (Boston PHP)... they are all interested in learning more. For LIPHP, I gave an hour-led discussion of object-oriented programming. I let everyone ask questions rather than prepare a speech, and I found that enabled me to really guage what the audience was capable of handling. Lastyear, Boston PHP asked me to give a talk about either how Java or .NET compares to PHP, but I never fulfilled that request. They were looking for something better than a blog post they might read on their lunch break.

Just 2 cents. It's actually pretty hard to get people to want to be like you. How did Michael Jordan do it? Was it just the Gatorade? Drupal-ade.

Edit: Awhile back I noticed I made similar comments about PHP on LtU and those opinions were consolidated up by Jeff Pinkston, a Microsoft developer on the Oslo project who has played a role in defining the query language for M.

It kinda reminds me of the html version of SICP ... please don't change it.

edit :
I forgot to add: happy 10th bee-day ltu!

It's just a stock Drupal theme that comes with every installation. It won't disappear.