It was about time. We'd been talking about the limitations of our first site for quite a while..."why can't we do this?" "who do I talk to about getting that?" and so on. While the content was great, it was difficult to update or help people find exactly the information they needed. As a result, SPS users and contributors came to rely upon the SPS forums for communicating.

In fact, SPS grew out of an online skateboard community from the Northwest: Jason "bobcat" Harrison's Sleestak.net. We met on the 'Stak, and Jason helped us a great deal in the early days by setting up a private forum for us to brainstorm and plan the organization that now produces this site and the Public Skatepark Development Guide.

That's why the SPS forums are so great!  And that's why we haven't touched them. The rest of the site needed some serious help and our first task was this:  How can we make the site easier to add important information to?

When SPS founders first met face-to-face, it was quickly established that SPS would become the gathering place for effective (and struggling) advocates so that they may share techniques, materials, data, and principles efficiently. A powerful byproduct would be that other people who had been tasked with some aspect of skatepark creation or management might also benefit from SPS' experience provided that the information was present on the site.

We set to creating that first SPS website with a firm vision of the graphic and editorial balance it would strike to attract both serious advocates and the professionals they might encounter in their advocacy travels. What we didn't anticipate, however, was that the site would need to grow and change at a pace that we were unprepared to meet. This was not for lack of ideas or content but for lack of technical support... SPS was and is an all-volunteer organization and it was simply too difficult to find individuals that had both the professional abilities and time to donate the significant hours it would take to keep up with our contributing body. The net result was that our online publishing efforts stalled.

With Chris Gilligan and Seth Johnson's vast technical assistance we struck upon a content management system that would enable easy updates with nominal training. In just a few minutes anyone can submit new content to the site. This is the first of many successes to come now that we can focus less on "how do we?" and focus more on what needs to be said.

The new CMS implementation could not have been accomplished without the countless hours donated by Chris Gilligan. If you happen to pass him in the hall, give him a hug.

If you're not registered on SPS yet, please do so. We'll soon have content available only to registered members and we'd hate for you to miss something.

If you're currently registered and are a contributor, please contact Chris Gilligan or Peter Whitley about access, training (if necessary), and submission guidelines.