ApacheCon US site up

For some this may be old news, but the ApacheCon US 2008 website is up now. And yes, we finally have an iCal version of the schedule (which is still being updated).

As far as the conference goes, there are a few rather notable changes. For one, the hackathon will be “officially” open to public. Traditionally, the hackathon was aimed at ASF committers and members, but we’re doing away with that idea and letting anyone who wants to show up and code join in the fun.

But more importantly, we’re having a barcamp on the second day (that’s US election day, by the way). The barcamp is a bit of an experiment and will effectively be run as a separate event from the main, traditional conference. Details are still being put together, but, hey, that’s how barcamps work.

Anyway, I’ll save all the interesting conference announcements for the forthcoming press releases and emails (I suppose I might be jumping the gun with this blog post, oh well). What I’m actually interested in sharing about is the website itself.

I threw together the code for the current website in about two weeks in between other things because I simply couldn’t stand using the old code base any longer (we had talked about replacing the code several times). So now we have a nice and shiny new site running using the Radiant CMS powered by Ruby on Rails. There are plenty of rough edges, so I’m sure we’ll have some hiccups in the transition, but I’m happier with this site than I have been with the last three.

Speaking of that code, it’ll soon be available for your perusal under the Apache license. Still need to work out where that code will live, but it should be public somewhere next week at latest. Technically what we have are a couple of extensions for managing conference data added to a fairly vanilla Radiant CMS 0.6.7 install.

And speaking of Radiant, this Cubicle Muses blog which has been faithfully powered by pyblosxom since 2006 will also soon by Radiant powered. Just need to finish the script to import the old articles and we’ll be live with a new look and new backend.