Since its introduction, WOW II has featured unlimited Custom pages. You may have noticed that the generated link to these pages is always a unique, ten-digit number(*) as follows:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=115-12-05&category=1324573457

This number is then associated with the menu entry and all of the content (announcement) entries in the WOW database, enabling the correct page to be constructed dynamically. Unfortunately, a ten-digit number is not particularly intuitive or memorable.

WOW has now been upgraded to use slugs - human-readable phrases based upon the actual menu entry - instead of the ten-digit number. For example, if you create a custom menu item "Get a VSC Today!", the slug will be "get-a-vsc-today", and page's URL will be:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=115-12-05&category=get-a-vsc-today

Slugs are popular because they enable search engines -- which treat the words in the slug as keywords -- to find the page.

All custom pages created after May 30, 2012 will have slugs in their URL. Custom pages bearing the old ten-digit category code may be converted with a new push button utility that appears in the WOW Dashboard, called "Rewrite Custom Slugs". Look for it under "WOW Utilities" in the Dashboard's left menu. Simply click this "link" and all of the custom page URLs in your unit's site will be converted. In addition, all links to converted pages anywhere in the entire WOW II system will be converted as well.  This means, for example, if a flotilla website contained a link to a custom WOW page on a district site -- as an external menu item or coded into an anouncement -- this link will be converted in the database so that it will continue to point to the correct page.

Webmasters, however, should be cautioned that if you published a link to a custom page outside the WOW system, for example on an AIRS website, on a third-party site, or even in a brochure or flyer, that link will be broken after you click "Rewrite Custom Slugs". To aid you in manually converting these, the Dashboard produces a cross-reference report in the "Rewrite Custom Slugs" utility.

All units are asked to use the "Rewrite Custom Slugs" utility to update their site as soon as possible.

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(*) Geeks among you might be interested to know that the ten-digit number is actually the number of seconds since the beginning of the UNIX epoch (0000 GMT on January 1, 1970) at the instant that you created the custom menu item. For further reading, see Unix Time in Wikipedia. For more about slugs, read "Slug (Web Publishing)" from the same source.