It took me much less time than I expected to put the new layout of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website together. Observe.

Okay, that's basically because most of the design was already made long time ago, in the form of the site's earlier incarnation, codenamed “Soradoc”, which looked rather busy and useless with the sidebar and other design elements. The new design, “Kalari”, removes the sidebar, clears the site banner a bit, and blends the site with Wesnoth.org as far as appearance is concerned. It's not the same design, but it's similar — that should be a good thing considering the purpose of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev.

That site also had a Blosxom-based blog, but I removed it since nobody was making actual use of the space.

The greatest thing about all this is that most of the PHP, “Poison Ivy” was finished in 1 night, while the rest took me just a few additional hours. Now that Poison Ivy is completed, I can reuse its code for the next incarnation of this very website and blog.

It's all for teaching some web design and programming basics to myself, really.

(No, not that one.)

There are many content management systems out but all of them seem to require some sort of database server and occasionally sacrifice flexibility in favor of ease of use.

This is why neither this site or Wesnoth-UMC-Dev's use one of those nifty software packages although they still use PHP. The latter website uses a bunch of ugly code codenamed “Soradoc” which has the actual XHTML layout embedded on it; the CSS stylesheet is also codenamed Soradoc and it's derived from “Glamdrol”, the Wesnoth.org wiki skin by Ettin; and “Dorset”, which is Soradoc's immediate ancestor, used on this very personal website — which in turn uses PHP code derived from the current incarnation of “Soradoc”.

Enter codename “Poison Ivy”, which is basically the same thing as Soradoc/Dorset, except written from scratch, much cleaner and more flexible; in particular, the XHTML layout and the site configuration are no longer part of the engine's source code which will allow me to share that among both websites more easily. It also introduces seamless support for document compression, which may be useful for my personal website.

Ivy is mostly finished, but I'm now busy reworking the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev site's design under a secret project, codename “Kalari”. Maybe once I'm finished with that, my next web project will be bringing umcreg (codename “Thoria”) to life.

(Okay, it's not a secret anymore. Dammit.)