What software does alistapart use for comments?

[hairybob]

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with www.alistapart.com

I love this site - not just the articles, but the elegance of its layout, typography, etc

Does anyone know what software this site uses for the comments on articles. I'm guessing, given the level of sophistication of the site, that it is something developed in-house and therefore not commercially available. I'd love to have something similar to this but can only imagine achieving something like this using wordpress.

The problem as I see it, many sites using wordpress seem to look very similar. Just by looking at them, you can tell they are wordpress sites! Is there any way of overcoming this?

[Gamermk]

Do you think Sitepoint is a wordpress site?

(I'm definitely a huge fan of alistapart too!)

[vgarcia]

Sitepoint's blogs do use Wordpress actually.

ALA is a custom Ruby on Rails application made just for the site to my knowledge.

[hairybob]

Thanks for your reply.

No - I don't think alistapart is a wordpress site. In fact, I'm sure it's not!

What I was trying to say is that the only way I (me personally) can currently imagine achieving something similar would be to use wordpress. I am definitely not saying alistapart is a wordpress site.

If anyone has any other ideas / suggestions of how something similar to alistapart's article comment feature could be achieved, I'd love to hear it...

Cheers

Hairybob

[hairybob]

Really - wow!

Is this difficult to achieve?

[vgarcia]

Really - wow!

Is this difficult to achieve?

Are you talking about how the comments are split into different pages? That's pretty easy to do. You can probably take existing software and hack that in yourself. Someone might have even made that functionality available as a plugin.

[Gamermk]

I should have been more clear.

Sitepoint doesn't look like a wordpress site I believe even though it does use wordpress. (and I agree that alistapart isn't a wordpress site, I wasn't trying to imply that.. I really do just like it as well)

Just let your own creativity overcome the obstacle. If you don't want your wordpress design to look like everyone else's then don't let it

[hairybob]

Thanks guys! Wordpress is nice software - if it's good enough for a site like alistapart, it's definitely good enough for me. I think I just need to learn more about what is possible with it so that I don't use it as an excuse for having it look the same as other sites.

Once again, thanks.