Universal Modder changelog: site and upstream updates

This changelog tracks two things: updates to these guides, and meaningful changes in the upstream universal-modder project that affect the guides — new commands, new engine playbooks, new field notes worth pointing readers at. Entries are written only when something real changed, which is also the rule the site holds itself to in public.

2026-10-13 — Foundation release (P0)

The site went live. This release is infrastructure: a static Astro build with zero client-side JavaScript, a canonical origin at universalmodding.com, and a deployment pipeline where every push rebuilds and redeploys through Cloudflare.

• Repository and gates. The source is public, and every page must pass three automated gates before it ships: an SEO gate (unique titles and descriptions, exactly one h1, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, no placeholder copy), a link gate (every internal link resolves, external links carry rel=“nofollow” and do not 404), and a structured-data gate (valid JSON-LD matching the page type).

• Keyword discipline. Every page owns exactly one primary keyword, recorded in a single mapping file. Duplicate primary keywords fail the build — the mechanical version of “do not compete with yourself”.

• URL policy. No trailing slashes, no .html endings, one canonical origin. Requests to the www subdomain are redirected 301 to the apex domain, with path and query string preserved.

• Verification. Lighthouse mobile on the production URL scores 100 across performance, SEO, accessibility and best practices, with a 1.0 s largest contentful paint, zero layout shift and no blocking scripts. The sitemap, RSS feed and robots file are generated at build time and validated in CI.

2026-10-13 — Content release (P1)

The first content batch ships today: eight pages that form the site’s entry point, each one written to answer a question people actually type into a search box, and each one linked into the others so nothing is orphaned.

• The homepage — what the toolkit is, the quick-start commands, the ten-step loop, and the safety boundaries.
• What is Universal Modder — the definition, what it is not, and how a session actually goes.
• Install guides — a hub with commands for all six supported agents, plus dedicated walkthroughs for Claude Code and Codex.
• The first mod walkthrough — the loop applied step by step, from um scan to the closing field note.
• The FAQ — eleven questions covering safety, pricing, consoles, online games and hardware.

Every page in this batch is at least 600 words, carries structured data matched to its type (Article, HowTo or FAQPage), and links to at least two pages in its cluster. All of it passed the gates before publish.

2026-10-14 — Deploys move into GitHub Actions

Deployments now run from this repository instead of a dashboard-side build: every push to main builds the site, runs the same three gates that protect every page, and ships the result to Cloudflare Workers with wrangler. Unknown-path handling was fixed in the same change — a missing page now serves this site’s own 404 document instead of a platform default.

How this changelog will be maintained

Content pages are held to a hard floor of 600 words, one h1 per page, unique titles and descriptions across the whole site, at least two internal links to pages in the same cluster, and at least one inbound link — orphans are rejected at build time, not discovered months later in a crawl report. When a gate fails, the page does not ship, and this changelog does not pretend otherwise.

Going forward, the plan is a weekly check of the upstream repository: new field notes, new commands, or changes to existing playbooks that make a guide wrong. Those updates land here with a date and a one-line explanation, and the affected pages get corrected in the same change. Silence in this changelog is not a bug — it means the guides still match the upstream project.

Game-specific and engine-specific pages are next. If you want to know what the toolkit covers before those land, the overview lists the engine families, and the FAQ covers the common questions.