Another "official" site has received a face, this time the Ruby language site. The Ruby site runs on the Ruby-based content management system, Radiant. My impressions in one word...Impressive.

In my opinion, Ruby as a programming language and Radiant as a CMS are still in its adolescent years of development. However, if the Ruby language site is any indication...it is more than ready to compete with those that have been around a lot longer.

There can be a lot of politics involved in changing community sites, but it seems that the site maintainers did everything right:

As you can see the much anticipated redesign is now live. It was over a year ago that it was suggested that a “visual identity team” be formed for the purpose of redesigning the Ruby Web site. The redesign team created over 20 mockups for the the new site, posted several for the Ruby community to comment on, and finally decided on the current design.

Once the design was chosen it was lovingly converted to CSS and XHTML and an administration system was written for it. The content was then ported over from the old Web site and massaged by an enthusiastic group of volunteers.

Congratulations to all those involved with this both leading edge languages and CMS.

As a side note, some day I would like to learn more about Ruby. I know as a language it promises to be a "beautiful, artful language" by it's developers and users. But name one parent that doesn't say that about their child? However, due to my namesake, I likely will give Ruby a try no matter what. Though I can't help but think it was just yesterday that I left Perl to focus my attention on PHP. Also, that affair with Python didn't help in my progress to get to know PHP better than I should!

You can read the original announcement at the Ruby language site.