Aaron Lewis

GuildPortal Dev Blog

Updates from Aaron Lewis, GuildPortal Code Monkey

Entries From Aaron Lewis' Blog

Like/Dislike in Forums and More

Posted 2/11/2011 12:10 PM by Aaron Lewis. 26291 reads. Share:

Members of guild sites are now able to "vote" on whether they like or dislike individual posts. Images are included by default, but admins are able to specify their own custom images in Control Panel > Style Tools > Forum Icons.

Other changes going live:
  • Parent forums will now correctly show the sum count of posts and topics for both themselves and any child forums.
  • Marking people as having attended an event/raid in Event Follow-Up has been sped up.
  • WoW guilds with over 100 members will see all of their members (approximately 4 hours after the update for this to occur for all guilds).
  • Buncha little things for support tickets.

Crafting Marketplace

Posted 2/4/2011 9:56 AM by Aaron Lewis. 12994 reads. Share:

Todays update brings the new Crafting Marketplace widget. Members of your guild can use it to place, claim, and mark tradeskill-related orders fulfilled. For example, a member could place an order for 1,000 Arrows of Burning Ouchies. Another member, with the requisite skill of woodworking (and hopefully a pair of oven mitts), could then take the order. After the crafter has completed the order, they mark it as ready for pick up/delivery. Finally, the person who initially placed the order marks it as complete (picked up/delivered).

Throughout the process, web-based mail and regular e-mail are used for notification. For example, when the above sample order was initially placed, all woodworkers in the guild would have been notified of the new order.

Sub-Forums and Other Updates

Posted 1/18/2011 7:19 AM by Aaron Lewis. 10641 reads. Share:

This morning's code push consisted primarily of fixes in response to support tickets, excepting the addition of custom icons for the read/unread status of sub-forums. To set which images to display for sub-forums, open your Control Panel, click Style Tools, and then select Forum Icons. They're at the bottom.

Other things included in the push:
  • A new span with the class "SubForum" now wraps each individual sub-forum. This was put in to make it easy for those CSS-savvy types out there to customize the look of their forums further.
  • The forum question/answer text (bot protection) that shows up when guests post on your site now conforms to guild style, so that the question part is visible. In some cases, it would render as white text on a white background.
  • The ever-elusive thumbnail bug -- where you'd save a new thumbnail image for use in forums via your profile and it would not save -- has been snared and smooshed. However, after uploading your new thumbnail image, you may notice that the same image as before shows up in your profile settings when you click "View." This is because the new image saves as the same filename and browsers will cache images for a bit and serve them up from your disk, instead of re-downloading them. Hitting refresh on a forum page where you would see your thumbnail will clear the cached image, and you will see the new one.
  • In some cases, announcements were not showing. They are now.

Sub-Forums

Posted 1/4/2011 7:53 AM by Aaron Lewis. 15193 reads. Share:

Due to the many requests for this feature, GuildPortal now supports sub-forums! For those who aren't familiar with it, sub-forums allow you to select a parent forum when editing the properties of a forum. From the main forum listing in your forums widget, sub-forums are listed just below the description of their parent forum. For example, if your guild plays a game that has archetypes and then specific classes underneath archetypes, you might want to have a setup like this:

Class Discussion (Forum Category)
    Fighters (Parent Forum)
        Monks (Sub-forum)
        Brawlers (Sub-forum)
    Scouts (Parent Forum)
        Assassins (Sub-forum)
        Rangers (Sub-forum)

Used in concert with forum categories, you now have a much cleaner way to display many forums.

In order to start using this feature (going live at 1:30 PM EST January 4th), click Edit at the bottom of your forums widget, then click the Edit link under any of the listed forums. As long as the forum you're editing is not already a parent of other forums, you will see the drop-down list of other forums that the one you're editing may be a child of.

Network Maintenance Notification

Posted 12/30/2010 6:55 AM by Aaron Lewis. 5506 reads. Share:

During a maintenance window beginning Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 1:00 AM EST, we will be performing a code upgrade on network switches as recommended by their manufacturer. This change will be performed one switch at a time and minimal downtime is expected. The change has been planned extensively, and the procedure has been rehearsed and timed on test equipment. Please be aware, however, that unexpected outages are always a possibility. Thank you for your understanding!