imagineClub.at is now finally online

After almost 4 months of work I am pleased to announce that the new imagineClub Website is finally online at

http://www.imagineclub.at

You can read what this is all about here.

Besides the obvious design refresh the new website has numerous administrative improvements that allow us to more easily share information with members and also allow new members to join the fun since we are now able to unlock their accounts without having to hack SQL together.

As you may already know, the new website is also licensed as open-source software and the code is freely available from my GitHub Repository. Since we allow our users to use MSDN-AA the site internally uses my other open-source project elms-connector (source on GitHub) to connect up to the Microsoft servers.

And to take dogfooding to a new level, I already have a unpublished changeset that will make imagineClub.at use the dotlesscss project to improve the project's CSS.

You may have guessed by now that the whole site is completely built ontop of open-source frameworks. It is based on Castle MonoRail, running ontop of Castle ActiveRecord with some (but not deep) Castle Windsor integration.
In fact, I would have used Windsor more, but using the ActiveRecord pattern with all it's static goodness somehow limited the use of inversion of control.

I primarily chose Castle MonoRail due to the fact that I had come off a ASP.NET MVC project and wanted to learn another MVC framework besides the blue one. I can't say I'm sorry for that decision. MonoRail has proven itself to be a very mature and very extensible framework that supported me all the way to releasing the site. 
I do regret however chosing NVelocity as my viewengine, Spark seems to be the better choice at the moment and NVelocity is really awful when it comes to debugging problems.

Anyway: Thanks to all these great open-source projects that made this possible, and also a big thanks to Kristof who sponsored the new design!