Founded and launched during March of 1997 by Chris Routh as a site for him to share poetry and get feedback, The Den evolved into a community as other writers added their works to the site as well. By 1999 it was renamed The Den of Amateur Poetry from Routhy's Den, as it had grown in size. That new name needed to be changed to The Den of Amateur Writing in 2000 as the number of stories and other types of writings began to grow to represent over half of the submitted content. The original site was a static HTML site, with each submission arriving via email and being converted to a page manually by Routh.
In 2001, a PHP/MySQL based submission site was created, soon to be deprecated by adopting the first PHP/MySQL CMS, PHPNuke in 2003. PHPNuke was replaced with PHP-Fusion in 2005, marking the third major version of The Den of Amateur Writings software. In 2011, a fourth version was built and based on Drupal 7. The number of plugins and patchwork needed to get the desired functionality of The Den built into a generic CMS became the undoing of v4, and after a couple of years of struggling with performance and UX issues with v4, a loss of data from the database put the final nail in the coffin. The Den was rolled back to the PHP-Fusion v3 in 2014, with 3 years of the sites data lost. That was when the solutioning for a fifth version began to take shape, with code on an initial prototype being witten first in 2016 in Symphony framework. That prototype was abandoned in favour of the Django version in 2018, and Angular was settled on as the client in 2019. V5, after being developed and tested for 5 years, was released in 2023 and fully replicates the features of v3 and v4, with some features of v4 being finalized.
Submitted material reflects the views of the author and not the views of The Den of Amateur Writing as a whole.
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The following frameworks, libraries, services and tools were used to create the site.