[Dancer-users] Two years of Dancer!

[David Precious]

Hi all,

Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer hit CPAN!

According to the BackPAN, Dancer-0.9003.tar.gz hit CPAN on 07-Aug-2009.[1]

I think you'll agree we've come a long way since then, thanks to the awesome 
community and user base built up around the project since then.

In these two years, we've had countless valuable contributions from a large 
list of contributing users (see the list on the about page[2]), gathered over 
300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 
pull requests submitted... amazing stuff.

We've seen a wide range of awesome Dancer plugins[3] appear on CPAN.

We've seen Dancer presented at various conferences including FOSDEM, OSDC.fr, 
the French Perl Workshop, the Bulgaria Perl Workshop, PyWeb IL (a Israeli 
Python group).

We've seen screencasts on using Dancer (thanks Gabor!), we've seen Dancer 
discussed plenty within the Perl community with plenty of helpful suggestions.

Unfortunately, we've also seen some trolling from someone who, for reasons 
unknown, seems to take a strong dislike to the project - puzzling.

As a result of some of the trolling which included fake reviews falsely 
attributed to members of the Sinatra team, we've seen our initial inspiration, 
Ruby's Sinatra project, release a statement proclaiming that "Sinatra Loves 
Dancer"[4].


So, to celebrate Dancer's 2nd birthday, I think a little marketing effort 
would be good - I'd like to invite you all to let the world know what yout 
think!  Do you use Dancer?  Do you like it?  Let people know - blog about it, 
tweet about it, leave positive reviews & ratings on cpanratings.perl.org[5] or 
+1's on MetaCPAN[6] - however you like.

(If you leave reviews/+1's, feel free to also do so for any Dancer plugins you 
find helpful, too - they need the love too! :) )

Also, if you don't already, please "watch" the Dancer project on GitHub[7] - 
just go to the project page and click the "Watch" button near the top.

Pithy quotes on what you like about Dancer suitable for inclusion on 
www.perldancer.org/testimonials would be very welcome, too :)

Also, we've come a long way, but we have a long way to go, too - we have some 
great improvements to Dancer planned, but suggestions for new features would 
be very welcome - it's always good to know what users would like to see!

So, happy birthday Dancer, and happy dancing, community!

And, of course, an invitation - if you're interested in Dancer, but aren't 
already part of the vibrant welcoming community in the #dancer IRC channel on 
irc.perl.org, feel free to join us - see http://www.perldancer.org/irc for a 
web chat client if you don't use IRC normally.

[1] http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/S/SU/SUKRIA/
[2] http://www.perldancer.org/about
[3] http://p3rl.org/Dancer::Plugins (update due in next release, btw)
[4] http://www.sinatrarb.com/2011/07/21/sinatra-loves-dancer.html
[5] http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Dancer
[6] https://metacpan.org/module/Dancer
[7] https://github.com/sukria/Dancer


(I also posted this to my own blog at:

http://www.preshweb.co.uk/2011/08/happy-birthday-dancer/ 

 - we need to get the Dancer project blog up and running, I'll make serious 
efforts to get that sorted in the next few days.)


Cheers

Dave P


-- 
David Precious  ("bigpresh")
http://www.preshweb.co.uk/

   "Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
   it for the rest of your life". (Michael Sinz)