An attempt to rebuild the spring website that wasnt used due to forum politics
The site was built using a combination of dokuwiki and phpbb. Using CSS and modern html, it would replace the broken table based layout with a nicer looking clearer and more flexible layout. Criticisms of the current site were numerous, including the ‘wall of text’ that was the frontpage. This design was aimed at fixing that.
The design was implemented and announced to the forums to great fanfare. The code was submitted to the svn repository and deployed on an alternate sub-domain and improvements were made.
Why it wasn’t used
Someone named roflcopter made a mockup in photoshop of a frontpage design which caught many peoples attention. They preferred roflcopters solitary front page design despite there being no guidance on hwo the rest of the site would look and numerous problems pointed out. One day without any notification, the Administrator going by the name fnordia took it upon himself to implement Roflcopters design using basic table layouts and deployed it to the main site.
Nobody knew of this until the whole thing had gone live. Faced with an unfair situation, and a complete lack of cooperation, I stopped work on the new site. The spring community is left with many of their original problems, only now they have a pretty frontpage and a sheen over the sites design.