Portal to Hyrule (formerly Fans of Zelda) is a Zelda fan website created by DekuLink in October of 2006 originally as a Freewebs site called Fans of Zelda (The acronym for FoZ morphed into "Fozee", which is used to describe a fan of Zelda). DekuLink later changed the name to Portal to Hyrule and began to revamp it into a full website. The site finally released on June 28th, 2008. The site's main purpose is to provide a place for the community, as DekuLink did not want it to be "just another information site."
History
Portal to Hyrule started out in October 2006 as a Freewebs website under the name of Fans of Zelda. In November of the same year, DekuLink decided to change hosts to become "More of a site". This is when he came up with Portal to Hyrule because he felt that "Fans of Zelda" was a dumb name that was too "generic". Later in the same month, he met Dustin Frampton, a freelance webdesigner who worked for his church as the IT director. He began taking HTML, CSS, and Photoshop classes from Dustin. DekuLink decided to skip straight to a domain name as he started working on the site with Dustin & SkullKid. In the first week of December, Dustin bought the domain name: portaltohyrule.com for Deku as an early Christmas present for him to test the site out.
Whilst working on the site, procrastination got the best of him, and DekuLink ended up working on the site for almost two years. Eventually, Portal to Hyrule opened doors on June 28th 2008, 6 days after Deku's birthday. In December of 2008, DekuLink saw that the site needed changing, and he came up with several ideas for new features on the site, including the Portal to Hyrule Interactive (PTHI) site. He began development on a new layout and on the PTHI site, but he lacked knowledge of PHP. DekuLink began watching the "Diving into PHP" screencast by Jeffery Way to jump-start his knowledge of PHP, and the PTHI project.
On June 8th, 2009, the site became the 9th Mastermind at Zelda Wiki.org, with DekuLink becoming a Bureaucrat.
SkullKid Crafts (SKC)
SkullKid Crafts is an interactive feature of the site where you can learn how to make costumes and crafts, usually Zelda or comic book related. SKC was originally going to be a flash site during the early development stages, but DekuLink found that it would be easier to use HTML. SKC has gone through several different layouts, none of which "seemed fit" to DekuLink. DekuLink thinks that the current layout is "okay, but I want to do it again, one last time. To match the new PTH layout." There are currently only three crafts up (Although DL and SK have a list of more than 50 craft ideas). This is because SkullKid is a Sophomore in College, and is very busy. She feels that many crafts will be up in the summer. Several features are planned to release along with the new PTHI site including comments on crafts, favoring, and uploading your own crafts.
The NPTH
The NPTH (New Portal to Hyrule) is used to refer to the site's upcoming re-vamp of the site including: the "all user content" idea proposed by DekuLink on the PTH Forums, the Portal to Hyrule Interactive site, the re-vamp of SkullKid Crafts by adding new interactive features, and several other features around the website.
The layout that was made for the NPTH was released in early April because DekuLink was "Tired of seeing the old layout." A new layout for the Forums was also released to reflect the design of the new layout, but has unfinished areas where the default VBulletin images are still present.
Fozee
The acronym "Fozee" is a term that spawned off of the original Fans of Zelda name to describe a fan of the actual series. The term was coined by SkullKid and is pronounced "fOh-zEE".
- Pthlogocompare.jpg
Comparison between the old (MS Paint) and new (Photoshop) logos.