In preparation of the 2.0 release of Doomsday I have redesigned the dengine.net website from the ground up. The new design went live today.
While the old design has been perfectly adequate during the past years, I felt that a bit of freshness would do the site good. I also took the opportunity to tie all the parts of the site together and reconsider the overall organization.
There is a new navigation bar visible on all pages, even in the Autobuilder and Bug Tracker that have previously been detached from the rest of the site. This should make it easier to move around and find what you’re looking for. In the bottom of most pages, you can find the latest news and blog posts, recent builds, and currently running multiplayer servers — these were previously only shown on the dengine.net front page.
Following the migration of the forums, the Doomsday Engine Wiki has been replaced with the more focused and structured Manual. It uses DokuWiki, which makes it considerably less complex and lighter to run than MediaWiki. The old wiki will remain accessible at its old address (as read-only).
I quite enjoyed the chance to do some web development. The new implementation aims to be as light-weight as possible: there are no frameworks or toolkits in use beyond basic PHP and MySQL. Shared elements like the top bar are easily inserted into other pages via PHP includes. File caching is used in many places to reduce database access and other repeated processing. I’ve also been paying attention to making the CSS responsive and mobile-friendly.
Let me know if you find anything that seems broken. I will undoubtedly continue doing minor tweaks to the site over the coming weeks.