Sam

I remember that old colour scheme in action, I actually liked it and still sorta do although blue is nice too.

Congrats Ben I remember when this site had only 100 members, look how its grown!

Well my tablet pen is sorta broke its just the standard one that came with it is there any better ones for illustrating that I could buy to replace or shall I just buy the standard pen again?

Personally I think the sidebar would look better as a separated box and I think the whole layout is very cramped and needs to be spaced out. Its very nice but to make it perfect it just needs more spacing and maybe some more typographic or illustrative going on.

I think alternatives will arise like django, ruby on rails, .NET, coldfusion etc but I doubt php is going to stop being one of the most popular scripting languages for the web. Besides I think the more languages that arise it gives more of a choice so we as developers have options and something to compare php to.

You've sorta got the wrong end of the stick there leopard actually makes things incredibly easy with php & apache & ruby & rails all already installed you just need to enable php and turn on web sharing. Then setting up mysql isn't to hard either just download the leopard mysql dmg. Then setup the mysql root user then install phpmyadmin like any other php script(this has to be done after you have enabled php and apache).

Ruby on Rails is pretty hot right now look at twitter and yellowpages. Its also OO(Object Orientated) which is a very good concept to understand well and will teach you to work better at other scripting languages e.g. php. If you did choose to learn rails a good set of free screencasts to get you started are at http://www.buildingwebapps.com or if screencasts aren't your thing why not try a book from http://www.pragprog.com/ Agile Development with Rails book is highly recommended within the rails community. Anyway hope I've helped.

Any chance of getting a subforum dedicated to the hot new framework that is rails

installing on ubuntu or any linux distro should be easy install apache and the rails extension, or install webrick. You also need to install Ruby, and then the Rails framework.

remember ROR is a framework not a language your best comparing PHP to Ruby or PHP Cake(another framework) to ROR. And the reason ROR is used is because 1. its object orientated (if you don't know what this means its a good thing) php is not and 2. you can write everything a lot quicker(beast a forum system is written in 500 lines)

are you thinking of using a ecommerce script or coding from scratch?

Seriously if your on a mac you HAVE to use coda its the best thing there is way above dreamweaver and bbedit even though textmate is good it is still better than that... and its very cheap http://panic.com/coda . I couldn't live without it!

start building your own simple cms possibly and just expand an expand theres plenty of tutorials in books on how to start building a basic cms. You don't have to start out with wordpress functionality if your only doing simple pages from the start.

nice illustrating, I say either make the back white or grab some silver pens and use it for note taking

there stuff gets you on the write track, and teachs you in a very fast method.