For anyone geeky enough to wonder about what's gone into developing this site, here's a quick rundown.
The bulk of it was built with bbPress, the open-source forum tool spun off from WordPress. I chose bbPress because it had a number of features I want, was designed on the familiar model of WordPress and has an active development community. However, it is not as mature as WordPress and I quickly discovered some bugs. The good news is that the bbPress developers rapidly responded with fixes; the bad news is that they haven't formally been released yet so I had to dig them out of their code base and install them piecemeal. Good for my PHP skills but bad for rapid development of the site!
I also found a number of other issues with bbPress that I felt compelled to hack. For example, I had to modify the breadcrumb feature to show the ancestry of subforums, and it took some detective work to figure out how to add non-forum pages (maps and news) that use the forum templates. And I spent a long time restyling the CSS and futzing with graphics in PhotoShop. I'm still not satisfied, especially with the banner, but further futzing will wait on getting more functionality to work.
Besides bbPress, I added the standard Flickr photo badge you see in the sidebar, modified to mix the most recent photos from the Mueller pool with randomly selected past photos for variety. The news page uses Yahoo Pipes to merge (hopefully) Mueller-related items from a wide range of sources and Patrick Hunlock's wonderful client-side javascript to pull the JSON feed into the page.
The most important non-bbPress feature is still just in demo mode: the Google Maps mashup is not yet integrated with the forums. When it's done, you'll be able to tie a topic to a point on the map. My next step is to roll up my sleeves and learn about writing bbPress plugins that talk directly to the database.
