The way we’ve always done blog updates here is simple: write a post in our editor, fill in the metadata, hit publish. The publish button sends all that information to our SQL database, and depending on the circumstance, it sends it out to be queued for scheduling, or goes out straight away. (I’m simplifying this a LOT, since the technical details are well outside the scope of a marketing post like this.) This is an extremely common approach, and one that WordPress uses by default. When we were building this iteration of Kakariko Herald, that’s the approach we adopted. It wasn’t pretty, it was actually my first time putting anything like that together, but I made it work.
Since inception, Kakariko Herald has run on a special version of OneCMS, my (Slade’s) in-house content management system. For months, it has actually been stuck on version 6.1 (based on WordPress 5.1; confusing, I know), a messy antiquated version that used components from old, insecure versions of WordPress jumbled together. It became a hybrid between WordPress as a base, and OneCMS’s own code. However, since its introduction, OneCMS has received a full update to version 7[.0], then 7.1, then 7.2, which all utilize “database-less” functions and other code that simply wouldn’t work for a site with our needs.
So, we’re introducing our CMS today as “Sheikah Slate,” a name that absolutely fits our Zelda naming theme. Alongside the new name is a new marketing logo, which you can see above. This follows our brand new design language, which we announced in a separate post. We’ve also gone ahead and updated the base of our web app to use PHP 8 (from 7), and we now convert images from JPG to WEBP automatically. Additionally, we’ve started scaling up our servers with the infrastructure we already have, and are looking into expanding our infrastructure soon.
Kakariko Herald is a complex site to host now, and we believe that the introduction of Sheikah Slate will set us up for the future. We’ll be working hard at making it better for the foreseeable future, we promise!
