Chicks Dig Nerds, Right?

Where I’ve Been: Redux

Somewhere between shortly before my last entry and now, a lot of things have kept me occupied.  A relationship ended; a new relationship began; my work situation has changed (mostly leaving me on the looking for work end of things).  A lot of things that just weren’t conducive to staying focused an on topic for any given thing long enough for me to write about it.  Excuses aside, things have calmed down a bit, which leads to me getting more things done.

Currently I’m working on a new forum system, using Django as the platform.  Development has been a little slow up to this point, but I’ve got most of the overarching features hammered out and I’ve been cranking out a lot of code over the last few days.  It’s led me to some interesting thoughts on existing systems and their continued use.  Most commonly I see phpBB, with a handful of Invision Power Board setups floating around.  Two solid forum options…five years ago.  Why haven’t there been any better systems turned out?  Maybe my field of view is too narrow and I just haven’t seen any cool projects come to light here, but it seems to me like people are happy with the existing contenders.  That seems…odd to me.  Call me crazy.

At risk of seeming horrifically arrogant I’ve set about designing my own, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.  We’ll see how it stands up when it’s being used in a real deployment (which I’ll be doing soon for my WoW guild).  The major points at this time are eliminating unnecessary redirect pages and implementing a better permissions and organization system for threads and users.  I’ll probably put up a link to a generic testing version if people are interested in checking it out.