How’s it goin’, everyone? Marriland here! Apologies for the recent downtime. The Marriland website is now back online, although some of its functionality may be missing in the short-term and things may not work quite right. Sorry about that!
What Happened?
The Marriland website previously ran on a backend called WordPress, which is used to power a substantial portion of the web. And the programming language I used for the backend code like the Team Builder and Pokédex is called PHP (I first learned it all the way back in 2003!). On October 20, 2026, there were two major vulnerabilities in PHP that were discovered and loose in the wild.
Although these were patched by PHP, my near-term goal was to move away from WordPress and PHP anyway, and after discovering a separate potential security incident on the WordPress version of my website (it was fully contained and did not affect anything or anyone, thank goodness—the security measures I put in place for the server completely neutralized it!), I opted to temporarily shut down the website and create a static version of it that doesn't run on PHP or WordPress.
I didn't want to risk breaking the key functionality of the website or introducing some unknown, untested bugs by upgrading WordPress or PHP, so instead... well, instead I guess I opted to break the key functionality of the website by migrating it away from either of them. 😂 In the long-term, it just makes more sense and in the short-term it ensures security.
Nearly 6,000 pages were migrated over from the old Marriland website. That's a lot in a short amount of time! These are now available as static pages, so they should load much quicker and also have essentially no security risk.
Stuff Will Be Broken For A Bit
Unfortunately, this means some of the key features of the Marriland website are temporarily broken. Some of them will be much harder fixes than others, because they relied on intricate backend calculations and processing (the Marriland Team Builder), while others are in relatively decent condition like the walkthroughs and guides.
Current Known Issues
Here's a look at the current issues that I'm aware of (there are likely plenty more):
Most Severe
- Marriland Team Builder: Yeah, this one is a huge bummer because I know it's one of the most useful tools on the Marriland website. It used a lot of old code and I've been wanting to update it anyway, but this will require essentially a complete overhaul. I need to convert it from PHP and WordPress into Node/React/Astro, so it's not as simple as just changing a setting here or there. That's ok, though, because this is something I knew I needed to do anyway once I moved over to the new version of the website; I was just hoping to have it done so there would be no downtime. So I do apologize, but the Team Builder will take a week or two to be brought back, although I believe it will be much nicer once it returns!
- Marriland IV Calculator: The useful IV calculator is also, unfortunately, down at the moment as it required a backend data connection. Thankfully this shouldn't be terribly difficult to fix, but it will still take some work and it is completely unavailable right now.
- Advanced Pokédex Search: This one just completely will not work right now. Although since it only works for Generation VIII (yeah, I need to update to Generation IX and soon X, I know!), this is probably not a major loss in the short-term. But yes, it is completely broken right now.
Medium Severity
- Pokédex: The Marriland Pokédex is semi-operational. It only officially worked for Generation VIII anyway, and now that I'm away from WordPress, it should be substantially easier to add support for other generations as was always the plan. But needless to say, there are likely a few issues here and there with it. I had to generate just one long list of the entire National Dex since the other filter options wouldn't work, and search is broken with it right now. But at least it is fairly browsable in a pinch. (Man I can't wait to actually get this updated! WordPress held me back from this for far too long...)
- News Updates: Not really that Marriland is primarily a news site, but some of the archived news updates might not work right. Tags and categories are currently broken, but that's fairly minor in the big picture. I plan on redoing the whole news system anyway, but for right now, it's a bit of a mess. Not the end of the world though.
Low Severity or Untested
- There were a few styling issues in the Walkthroughs that I need to figure out.
- A few styling issues throughout the website overall.
- Probably a few missing or broken links.
How to Report Issues
If you run across any issues other than what is listed up above (which I'm already aware of), you can reach out to me in a few different ways:
- Email: [email protected]
- Bluesky (preferred): @Marriland.bsky.social
- Facebook: Marriland
- Mastodon: [email protected]
- X/Twitter: @Marriland (I don't really use X though.)
The Good News: Towards The Future
There is a silver lining in all of this: this move away from PHP and WordPress was something I've been working on for years now. I knew it was untennable and it slowed down my ability to update things at the pace I wanted to, because I always had to do things "the WordPress way" and worry things would be broken whenever I updated things. It was not a good situation, so over the past several years I've been working on different iterations of static versions of the Marriland website (or semi-static, so tools will work), which would be much more stable, much more resilient to security issues and technical issues, and would allow quicker development.
As of right now, this static version of the website is run through an engine called Astro, a very powerful static-site generator. I've actually been working on converting over the entire Marriland codebase to Astro-compatible languages (moving from PHP to TypeScript) behind the scenes, so thankfully I already had a bit of an idea of how to handle this migration.
My original plan was to have the Astro version at parity with the WordPress version before I switched things over, but due to the security issues with PHP and WordPress, honestly it's time to just rip the bandage off and take the plunge, so now the website is fully on Astro and is fully static! However, it's really just a bandage, using the HTML from the original WordPress version instead of rewriting it "the Astro way" (which is MUCH nicer and cleaner), so once I properly convert all of these pages, things will be really nice.
So What About Right Now?
Right now will be a bit rocky, but it's also given me that push and drive to finally move forward. A lot of the work and effort on the Marriland website has been behind the scenes, working on this very endeavor, but now there's really no choice but to move forward and that's OK. It means things might be a little broken in the short-term, but it also means I should have a much better ability to fix them as they won't have to go through five thousand different WordPress layers just to make sure they work right.
I do apologize for the inconvenience it causes in the short-term for you, though. My hope is to have everything fully operational no later than the end of the year, but I believe now that everything is moved over to Astro anyway, I can likely get it done even sooner.
Thank you for your patience and for your understanding!