I knew a server change was coming, but I didn't know there would be so many changes to the Compendium's layout. What happened to the front page with all the timely news updates? What happened to to all of the music links on the right? Is this temporary, or is this the way things are going to be from now on? I sincerely hope it's not permanent, because the way things look now, the Compendium looks like the archive of a dying website rather than the gateway to a thriving community. I say that with no disrespect to Ramsus or anyone else involved in the switch. I guess I'm just in a state of shock at seeing my sometimes online home stripped of all of its paint.
I had to throw out the old system because the CGI script for the news page was showing it's age, and the forum hacks I'd done to integrate it into the news system were holding back some important forum updates. The caching setup was also eating up a lot of system memory, making it impossible to fit into most hosting plans.
I had to throw out the old layout because the forum and wiki were several major versions out of date, and there have been updates to the skinning and template systems that made it more work to keep it than it would be to start from scratch. The site's been needing a mobile responsive redesign for a while now, so it had to go eventually. It'll be a while before I'll have a chance to work on the redesign, but I can start laying the foundation for the skins/templates in the meantime.
The old remix library that hadn't seen any use in the last few years was thrown out, because the PHP libraries for the database it used had long since been deprecated and removed in newer versions of PHP.
So really, I'm saving the site from dying a quiet death of legacy cruft and growing incompatibility with modern hosting.
In other words, don't panic because everything's looking plain all of a sudden. It's what's under the hood that counts, and what's under the hood is seeing some major updates and improvements.