Europa Games and Military History

Tag: wordpress

A small gem and a big conundrum

David Tinny was so kind as to provide a short game report of a WitD/GE test game he played this spring. Since the turn reports were sparse, I made a page for each year instead of each turn or month. Sadly enough, the website refused to show me the pages, throwing a 404 like a six-year-old looking for the third pair of gloves he was sent to school in. After neither my first strategy (googling the problem and implementing various fixes I have no idea how they are supposed to work) nor my second (ignoring and hoping it fixes itself by the way of a stray update) worked, I had to sit down and rattle a couple of loose things under the hood around. Y’know, like slapping a remote. And lo behold:

If you give a post a slug only made up from numbers, WordPress throws a hissy fit.

Of course, that applies to my wordpress, with my unique combination of various third-party plugins and my customized permalink settings. Apply at your own risk.

A slug, by the way, is the part of the URL that references the actual page, i.e. if your web-page named “Testing some stuff” had the URL “www.example.com/mysite/test” the slug for the page would be “test”). Why WordPress refuses to find the page …/ge-43-02/1940/ or …/ge-43-02/1940y/, but is perfectly happy to deliver at blazing speed a page under the adress of …/ge-43-02/y1940/, I do not know. Gremlins maybe. Bitrot most likely. Lazy programming FWIW. But frankly, I spent too much time experimenting around to find this, I am not willing to spend more time to fix it.

But, you, brave souls following me on this quick detour through the intestines of an aging wordpress installation, your prize is said game report, now available for your enjoyment here. Have a nice weekend!

P.S.: Some marketing genius did not only come up with this garbage, but obviously found enough braindamaged product owners to force some programmer to implement code into this content management system that makes sure WordPress is always spelled with a capitalized “P” in the middle, irrespective of however its written by the editor:

wordpress editor

A view from the backend editor: WordPress with a small “p”

People get paid for coming up with these kind of ideas, you know? There is a career in taking desicions away from users and proscribing them what they can write on their own website. Wordfilters next. Wouldn’t want to disturbe the monitarization of content, yo.

Yes, so far I’m happy with WordPress.

 

No more questions

Hi everyone,

apologies, but we had to deactivate the FAQs, since the plugin we used to display them managed to break WordPress’ backend. At least thats what we suspect, we were suffering from the “White Screen of Death” for some weeks now, and deactivating the plugin remedied parts of the trouble. We’re still having occasional whiteouts , though, and are trying to identify the source of the problem. What we can say for sure is that the site hasn’t been compromised or anything, trouble seems to be some outdated plugin code.

As soon as we manage to get the backend back to working order, we’ll try to salvage the FAQs and re-up them in a different format. After all, quite some effort went into putting them together, inclomplete as they were. For now though we’re working on being able to get the site back to properly operational status.

Finally – a new content management system

It might be nothing that gets most of you exited, but behind the scenes I have worked for the better part of two years to finally transfer the Generalstab Archives into a WordPress-driven website. The initial migration was easy, except that every single post still needed to be cleansed of PHP remnants, reformatted and categorized. The work still isn`t done, as a quick look into the archive section will tell, but frankly, I was not willing to wait any longer with going public.  So here is the biggest Generalstab update since 2012:

  • The home-brewn PHP-based, hand-coded pages have been transferred into a WordPress CMS
  • A complete new section containing all Europa-games ever published has been added, with scans and pictures of charts, maps, and boxes where available. (Note to the concerned reader: We have taken great care that the resolution of the images makes them readable, but is low enough to rule out any copyright violation.) Oh, and did I mention that we also added covers of all TEM magazines ever published, and of course the Glory and Great War-Series, too?
  • A nice responsive template that leaves lots of room for the relevant stuff, which in this case is: text.
  • Several new game reports, one of them being Greg Bartels description of his experiences with the Iraq Campaign Scenario from War in the Desert
  • Maps and other images from the public domain added to the essay section

We are looking forward to your feedback.

The Generalstab Archive lives by the contributions of the community, and we take great care to make sure we have permission for every single piece we publish. However, if you find anything you think is yours, or shouldnt be online, please drop us a line and let us know, and we will take the incriminated content offline immediately.