Aaron Lewis

GuildPortal Dev Blog

Updates from Aaron Lewis, GuildPortal Code Monkey

Entries From Aaron Lewis' Blog

8/24 Release

Posted 8/24/2012 6:49 PM by Aaron Lewis. 119275 reads. Share:

There are a couple releases rolled up in this:
  • Those who have topic update notifications sent to their mobile devices (via SMS) will now be able to click a link that will take them directly to the topic on the mobile version of their site (site.url/m).
  • Clicking on profile links now displays a context menu that provides the following options: Member Detail (displays the window that used to be the only option when clicking a profile link), Private Chat (if they're online), Visit Site (their personal site), Visit Wall, Send Mail and, if you're a roster admin of the guild, a link that will open up the member editor.
  • The voice server status widget now displays detail for both Ventrilo and Mumble servers. Previously, only Ventrilo server detail was available.
  • The Global Guild Bar can now have the foreground text of the main bar customized.
  • The Star Wars: The Old Republic server status widget was hanging when the SWTOR servers were slow to respond, so the duration the data is cached has been increased.
  • The Who's Online widget will now auto-update its list as members log in and time out.
  • Links to support videos in the Control Panel Dashboard have been fixed.
  • New CSS classes have been added for the Shouts widget for those who want to modify the appearance of it at a more detailed level. They are gp-shout, gp-shout-source, gp-shout-body and gp-shout-ally-link. They, along with full descriptions of where they appear and what they contain, are documented in the GuildPortal CSS class listing (available from many of the Custom editor sections of the Control Panel).
  • The Forums widget would stretch out beyond the boundaries of the page width style settings if any of the forums had a lot of sub-forums. This only happened in IE, but it's fixed anyhow.
  • The One-on-One Chat area that displays incoming chat was not scrolling far enough down when new items came in. This has been fixed, along with an overhaul of the One-on-One Chat UI.
  • The member editor grid in the Control Panel now offers the option to export to Excel, PDF, Word or CSV.
  • The member editor grid has also been enhanced with an easy-to-use filtering control that lets you build complex queries against your member listing. For example, you could easily build a query to return all members with an access level less than officer that haven't logged on for over a year.
  • The queries involved in reading posts in a topic have been optimized quite a bit, so your forums are a bit quicker.
  • The border color of Guild Global Bar sub-menus can now be customized.
  • The size of the content zones (left, center and right) on any guild page can now be dynamically resized by simply clicking and dragging when you are logged in with Designer rights. You don't even need to enter page edit mode.
  • When updating to the latest version of a widget-type mod, your settings for which page it appears on, the title, and the order were all wiped out. This no longer happens.

7/13 Release

Posted 7/13/2012 4:12 PM by Aaron Lewis. 114961 reads. Share:

Here are the highlights from this week's update:
  • One-on-one chat now works across public-side (meaning just browsing around GuildPortal), blogs, and guild pages. You'll be notified of chat requests no matter where you are.
  • Posts now have a link along the bottom for forum moderators/admins that lets them move the post to another forum/topic of their choosing.
  • Inbox messages now show up on the /m (mobile) versions of your sites.
  • The guild chat link again displays the count of people in chat.
  • A new widget, called "Available Achievements and Medals," has gone live. It lists the achievements from the guild that members may earn, medals they may be awarded, and also GuildPortal achievements that are available.
  • The "Wall" and "About Me" links are now back on the profile page.
  • Some more work has been put into the Dev Status pages. Next week's milestone is empty, but that just because this week's kept me busy up until the very end. I'll be filling it in on Monday.
  • RSS links have been added to the issue comments so you can subscribe and be notified when issues you are interested have updates to their status.
  • The member editor's "Characters" tab for each member now displays a link indicating whether that character is blocked from display on the roster. It also allows you to toggle block status.
  • The member editor grid displays more rows now.
  • Achievements (all three kinds) now display on the "About Me" page of member blog sites.
  • The roster blocks that were mysteriously applying themselves to innocent victims have been slain.
  • A bug causing the forum moderators editor to come up blank has been fixed.
That's all for now!

GuildPortal goes Mobile!

Posted 5/22/2012 10:56 PM by Aaron Lewis. 164513 reads. Share:

Note: If you do not want to read through this whole post and just want to get to your mobile site, the address is your.guild.domain/m. For example, if your sub-domain is icanhaz and your primary domain is guildportal.com, your mobile site would be at icanhaz.guildportal.com/m
Phone showing GuildPortal Mobile I've been mostly working on support tickets and this nebulous thing I'm calling GP-5 (shhh, Sandy would be furious if she found out). Also, Sandy and I are really going to put our heads together to come up with something for the progression widget. However, with all this stuff going on, we managed to get something pretty neat out the door for those of you who use a phone to check up on your guild forums and web mail...

Now, a lot of people already know that GuildPortal can notify you of things such as when new web mail arrives, an event/raid is starting soon, whether someone replied to a topic that you are subscribed to, when your (or others, if you're an events admin) event/raid status changes are sent to your SMS-capable phone. Also, admins can be notified the instant a new applicant signs up to the site.

For those who didn't know about this feature, open Profile from any guild page, then click Text Messaging to set up your cell phone provider, number, whether notifications are enabled, and which types of notifications you want to receive.

Okay, this next part is a relatively big deal for us. If you go to your site's domain (like http://admins.guildportal.com) and add /m after it, you will be on a site that has some functionality of your full site, but has the added benefit of being much faster to load. So, if you're a member of the Admin Help Community, head on over to http://admins.guildportal.com/m right now on your phone and check it out. If not, try your own guild's domain.

The mobile site was written on jQuery Mobile, and so it should support the following devices with no problems (although not all the bells and whistles may be there on older devices -- like mine. Iphone 1. I swear it's gas-powered.):

The so-called "A-grade" browsers. Full enhanced experience with Ajax-based animated page transitions.
  • Apple iOS 3.2-5.0 - Tested on the original iPad (4.3 / 5.0), iPad 2 (4.3), original iPhone (3.1), iPhone 3 (3.2), 3GS (4.3), 4 (4.3 / 5.0), and 4S (5.0)
  • Android 2.1-2.3 – Tested on the HTC Incredible (2.2), original Droid (2.2), HTC Aria (2.1), Google Nexus S (2.3). Functional on 1.5 & 1.6 but performance may be sluggish, tested on Google G1 (1.5)
  • Android 3.1 (Honeycomb)  – Tested on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola XOOM
  • Android 4.0 (ICS)  – Tested on a Galaxy Nexus S. Note: transition performance can be poor on upgradeddevices
  • Windows Phone 7-7.5 – Tested on the HTC Surround (7.0) HTC Trophy (7.5), LG-E900 (7.5), Nokia Lumia 800
  • Blackberry 6.0 – Tested on the Torch 9800 and Style 9670
  • Blackberry 7 – Tested on BlackBerry® Torch 9810
  • Blackberry Playbook (1.0-2.0) – Tested on PlayBook
  • Palm WebOS (1.4-2.0) – Tested on the Palm Pixi (1.4), Pre (1.4), Pre 2 (2.0)
  • Palm WebOS 3.0 – Tested on HP TouchPad
  • Firebox Mobile (10 Beta) – Tested on Android 2.3 device
  • Chrome for Android (Beta) – Tested on Android 4.0 device
  • Skyfire 4.1 - Tested on Android 2.3 device
  • Opera Mobile 11.5: Tested on Android 2.3
  • Meego 1.2 – Tested on Nokia 950 and N9
  • Samsung bada 2.0 – Tested on a Samsung Wave 3, Dolphin browser
  • UC Browser – Tested on Android 2.3 device
  • Kindle 3 and Fire - Tested on the built-in WebKit browser for each
  • Nook Color 1.4.1 – Tested on original Nook Color, not Nook Tablet
  • Chrome Desktop 11-17 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
  • Safari Desktop 4-5 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
  • Firefox Desktop 4-9 – Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
  • Internet Explorer 7-9 – Tested on Windows XP, Vista and 7
  • Opera Desktop 10-11 - Tested on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7
"B-grade" browsers  Ehanced experience except without Ajax navigation features.
  • Blackberry 5.0: Tested on the Storm 2 9550, Bold 9770
  • Opera Mini (5.0-6.5) - Tested on iOS 3.2/4.3 and Android 2.3
  • Nokia Symbian^3 - Tested on Nokia N8 (Symbian^3), C7 (Symbian^3), also works on N97 (Symbian^1)
C-Grade Basic non-enhanced HTML experience that is still functional
  • Blackberry 4.x - Tested on the Curve 8330
  • Windows Mobile - Tested on the HTC Leo (WinMo 5.2)
  • All older smartphone platforms and featurephones – Any device that doesn’t support media queries will receive the basic, C grade experience
There is a feedback button there in your member screen. Please feel free to use it. We would love to hear back from you on this. We will no doubt be adding more features (right now, only mail and forums really work completely, oh and the welcome message, underneath the user's start page for the guild).

For more information on graded mobile browser support based upon JQuery Mobile (which we are using for the /m functionality of your sites) library, click here.

This is not the regular update. There's just been enough testing that I'm comfy letting you all know about it. :)

GP Update: New Silverlight Gallery and Future Plans Revealed!

Posted 1/27/2010 12:52 PM by Aaron Lewis. 9475 reads. Share:

There's a new Silverlight-based gallery for your guild images available.  You can get to it from any gallery widget on your sites by clicking Open Gallery.  This opens the existing gallery, but in the top, right-hand corner is a new link to open the Silverlight version.  If you don't have the Silverlight plug-in, you'll be prompted to install it.

It's in "beta" for the moment.  One notable feature is missing -- the ability to comment on images.  We wanted to get it out there in order to get some feedback on how people feel about taking a more RIA approach when it comes to future features and enhancements. While RIA (rich internet applications) can be, at the lowest level, simply Ajax-based (as GuildPortal is now), the frontier "Web 3.0" world looks to be populated with technologies like Silverlight and Adobe AIR/Flex.

If this is received well, we can put more emphasis on developing these kinds of richer (even occasionally disconnected!) features for your guild sites, moving from web sites to richer, more fully-featured guild management applications with more responsive and attractive interfaces.  Of course, our stamp on the world of guild hosting has always been customizability, and that would move to the new platform, too!

It's important to emphasize that we've no plans to abandon the web-page side of things.  All of this would be complimentary and fully integrated.  Nor is building bigger and better always the way to go.  For example, we also have plans for a fully-featured mobile client (based on standards, not for any specific device).

So if  you've got a moment, pay a visit to the GuildPortal Admin Community and let us know what you think.

GuildPortal Service Update, 11/6/2009

Posted 11/6/2009 7:12 AM by Aaron Lewis. 5844 reads. Share:

A new widget that lists items that have dropped on raids, newest first, has been added.  You can head to your Control Panel -> Site Pages and select a page you'd like to add it to, then click the Add Widget tab.  It's listed as "Recent Raid Drops."

Also, the WYSIWYG editor has had some selectors added along the top, for you to select different modes that might make more sense, depending upon what you're editing.  For example, for most content, either the Wysiwyg/Html or BbCode modes make the most sense, BbCode being your best bet if you're posting from most mobile devices.  

However, if you're making use of jQuery or applying some other neat effects to your site (as an admin, since only admin-level content enables it), the Raw/Script view will help immensely.  It applies no formatting, so it won't strip it out, or in any other way mess around with your custom code.