The Case for a New Site for Perl Beginners

Hi all!

When one visits http://www.perl.org/
one sees the following note on the
left:

<<<<<<<
New to Perl?

<a href="http://learn.perl.org/">See
our Resources for Perl Beginners</a>
>>>>>>>

Now as I've mentioned before there are several huge problems with 
learn.perl.org:

1. It hasn't been maintained in several years now.

2. Its front page contains a list of books, most of which are not
available 
online and nothing else. 

3. There aren't any links to online tutorials anywhere on the site. 

4. There aren't any links to other important online resources (wikis,
mailing 
lists, etc. either.

5. The beginners-workers mailing list is closed for subscribers and has
become 
completely unresponsive.

--------

learn.perl.org is also linked from many other places. Now, for the past
I've 
been working on the Perl Beginners' Site ( http://perl-begin.berlios.de/
). 
This site suffers from none of the problems I mentioned, and also has:

1. A clean XHTML 1.1+CSS 2.1 design.

2. Based on Latemp - http://web-cpan.berlios.de/latemp/
.

3. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License license. I can
also 
make it Public Domain, if the need arises.

4. Full source code is available online:
http://perl-begin.berlios.de/source/.

5. It is still actively maintained (albeit recently I found little that I 
needed to add there, because the site is already good enough.)

-------------

Because of the sub-optimal state of learn.perl.org, I'd like to propose
that 
I'll be given the ability to revamp it, using the material from
perl-begin. 
Then I can simply redirect perl-begin to learn.perl.org. But the current 
situation is unacceptable.

If anyone can tell me where I can find the source code for learn.perl.org,
or 
give me a limited access to it, I'll greatly appreciate it. I have enough 
free time for this and believe this is a worthy goal.

I should note that the perl.org admins, did not yet integrate a previous
patch 
I wrote to incorporate a http://www.perl.org/learn/
section instead.
(Which I 
think is a bad idea because it will break a lot of URLs). I don't blame
them 
because they had many hardware failures and other problems to deal with. 
Since then the Subversion repository that contained the sources for 
www.perl.org has gone offline, and I can no longer access it without a 
password. So now my patch is out-of-date and I can no longer write a new
one.

See:

http://www.mail-archive.com/advocacy%40perl.org/msg01816.html

For a previous discussion of it.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
        http://www.shlomifish.org/

Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then
destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his
secrets.