Darkpower here, telling you that Game Gazette is back after a few days of uncertainty. Unfortunately, some things got lost in the process, but hopefully, everything is working out better now. Let me tell you first about what the result is, and then tell you about what led to this.

As you can probably see, we have a new layout for doing things. This is because the last layout was through Joomla, something I thought was a good Content Management System (CMS for short). More on that later, but this new one is for Wordpress. Yes, it is official: I’ve changed news management systems. Although a TAD bit scaled down, you can see that it is a HELL of a lot easier for me, not being the best speller in the world and for everyone who wants to comment, as everything I need and want for this site is at the core. Nifty, eh?

Unfortunately, if you will notice, none of the articles you see right now have comments, even if they did previously. The issue I had wiped everything out (I’m lucky I got all the stories back as it was). So if you commented on a story, then don’t expect your comment to be on the story anymore. Also, if you bookmarked a story or linked to a story on a website, you will have to update any bookmarks or site links. I apologize for any inconvenience there.

In fact, it gets somewhat worse: If you registered before, you will have to reregister. I tried to find anything I could to import this stuff, but this was lost for good. The stories were my main concern (since the other things, while bothersome, wasn’t as catastrophic as the loss of the stories would’ve been). Reregister and get back in the game.

Now, to what transpired to cause this in the first place.

As I had said before, I was using Joomla. Good program for CMS…until you find out that not many things are in the core program and that the thing is kind of unstable. Every feature you saw through the Joomla powered site needed an extension for me to get it to you. Not fun, especially when half of those plugins ended up not doing what I had intended, or the actual purpose of the plugin didn’t match my intentions (even when said plugins have descriptions that make you think it’s for one thing and then it’s actually for another). Furthermore, the plugins have plugins of their own, and some of THOSE aren’t exactly stable. As for help with those plugins? Let’s just say my query on a forum ABOUT one of those plugins has yet to get an answer from ANYONE. Not to mention that these things should’ve been in the Joomla core to begin with. But alas, it wasn’t too bad.

However, the last straw came because of my intentions to provide a php-BB forum for the site (which, by the way, I still intend to accomplish). My view was to make it so that you could’ve used your original login for the php-BB forums so you didn’t have to have two seperate logins for the same site. Now, supposidely, there are extensions for Joomla (imagine that. ANOTHER plugin) that let you do this. Well, first plugin I tried wasn’t compatible with the version of PHP that GoDaddy had installed (and the process of fixing this was too much of a hassle for me). I then try another extension, and it works for a time (not for what I wanted to do, though, but it was functionable for “bridging” the two things), but then things go south. I end up messing up the php-BB install, and have to reinstall. The uninstall of php-BB goes smoothly enough, but I need to uninstall the plugin I had for Joomla because I had already entered info into that and it might conflict with other things when I go to reinstall the board. Going to search for the uninstall for program 2 (the one I eventually decide to try), I first decide to uninstall program 1 (the one that is incompatible with my PHP version). Problem here: THERE WAS NO UNINSTALL OPTION FOR PROGRAM 2! I looked everywhere for that damn thing, but I couldn’t find it. I look and look and look, and nothing.

Now, to reinstall php-BB, I need to delete something in my MySQL. When I do that, I run smack dab into the fatal error: Something is missing. Guess what it was? PROGRAM 1! You see, in the process of INSTALLING program 1, it decided to edit my php files for what it had to do. BAD FUCKING IDEA, since uninstalling it made it break. At least I think it was solely that (program 2 didn’t exactly help since IT was looking for something that it couldn’t find that was actually there). So, basically put, the site went through a bunch of missing files from me trying to figure out the main culprit as to what was causing these errors, and doing THAT seemed to make things worse. A 500 internal server error hit the site, and my first thought was “oh shit, there goes Game Gazette.” THANKFULLY, I ended up saving the stories (again, my main concern at that point, as the users can always reregister, as much as I hate to have to make them do, and I can always get new comments for my stories, but if the stories are gone, then it’s sort of game over right there) thanks to WP and it’s easier way of doing things. Themes and plugins are also ten times easier to come by. Basically put, I now see why so many gaming blogging sites use this thing.

That and I’m officially DONE with Joomla….well, until they make something that actually WORKS the way it’s supposed to.

But alas, thanks to some quick thinking, GG is back again. WHEW!!