Aaron Lewis

GuildPortal Dev Blog

Updates from Aaron Lewis, GuildPortal Code Monkey

Entries From Aaron Lewis' Blog

GP Update: Two New Widgets!

Posted 8/11/2010 1:46 PM by Aaron Lewis. 26255 reads. Share:

For those who'd like a little more integration between their guild sites and the social networking giants out there, we have added two new widgets: Twitter Feed and Facebook Like.

The Twitter Feed widget lets you tap into any publicly-available Twitter user's feed and display it on your site, just like any other widget. It also comes with some customization options and automatic (without having to refresh the page) updates.

The Facebook Like widget displays a link to visitors which they can click to "Like" your site on Facebook, as well as see how many others have already done so. Regardless of where you place the widget, it's site-level, so place it wherever you want, and the like count will apply everywhere.

GP Update: WoW Add-On Update

Posted 8/9/2010 12:47 PM by Aaron Lewis. 10310 reads. Share:

The GPHelper add-on for WoW has been updated to version 1.60, and addresses a problem where bank item imports were simply adding the items to the running list, without first checking to see if they were there. This resulted in saved variables files that became quite large, and uploading it could result in errors.

Everybody should install the update (a link is available in the Control Panel under WoW Integration), and those who were affected by the errors on upload should be sure to run a "/gph update" (without the quotes) command, in-game.

GP Update: Calendar and File Manager Updates

Posted 8/6/2010 2:54 PM by Aaron Lewis. 7491 reads. Share:

  • You are now able to specify an end date/time for events, either through the event editor or by viewing the events in weekly agenda view (on the regular, large Calendar widget) and dragging the bottom of the event to a different end time. Note that you can also drag and drop events on the calendar to change days or start times, as well.
  • The Events List widget, when placed in the center of a page, will now display much like the full calendar, except with only the current week displayed.
  • Icons for custom event categories will now display at 16x16 pixels, instead of 12x12.
  • The File Manager has been cleaned up a bit, and multi-file uploads are back. In addition, auto-optimization of JPG images has been improved quite a bit. If you've tried it in the past and were disappointed with the image quality, give it another try!
  • The Quests widget now lists categories as a selection, instead of just dumping the full list of quests. Got pretty messy there for active questing guilds.

GP Update: Posting, Applications, and Polls

Posted 7/30/2010 5:15 PM by Aaron Lewis. 12202 reads. Share:

A problem with new posts sending you to the home page of your guild site after you were done has been fixed. We cornered the posts and explained to them that they were the ones who got sent, not the other way around. They put up a brief fight, but after a cheap shot, rolled up in a little ball.

When a new user applies to be a member of your guild site, a listing of characters they're signing up with will now be sent along with the mail you normally receive, as well as show up in any automatic forum post you may have configured.

The voting polls admin UI has been updated a bit, and you are now able to edit an already-created poll, so long as no votes have yet been cast for it. If they have, you will only be able to edit the close date and the minimum level to vote on the poll (old votes already cast from those below the new minimum level will remain, however).

The GuildPortal Admin Community (admins.guildportal.com) has had a bit of a make-over, though nothing terribly drastic. Well, except for "The WALL." Beware.

Finally, we believe we've got our maintenance scripts and backups now running on a schedule that should prevent too much overlap, although we're operating on a "wait and see" basis for the moment. If you've been on later in the evening (or early in the morning, depending on which side of the globe you call home), you may have noticed really slow response times or worse. Turns out that nightly full database backups colliding with full index rebuilds causes a bit of a bottleneck! Who knew?

GP Update: Forum Thumbs, Custom HTML and Themes

Posted 7/29/2010 1:38 PM by Aaron Lewis. 5990 reads. Share:

Forum and topic listings will now show the thumbnail image of the most recent poster next to their name link. This can be disabled by an admin by clicking the Edit button at the bottom of the forum widget and then clicking Display Options.

Only thumbnail images that were uploaded via the characters/settings page will display. Images that are hosted externally will not. This is for security, as browsers (like Chrome) are sometimes blocking pages that have images on them which are hosted on domains with a bad rep. If your thumb is hosted elsewhere and you would like for it to show up, right click and save it to your hard drive, then upload it in your Characters/Settings page.

The custom HTML editor in the Control Panel for banner, footer, and widget areas has been updated to occupy more of the available space, and the font size has been reduced a bit so that you can see more of your code at once.

When creating a new Ventrilo server, you now have the ability to specify which codec you would like for it to use.

If you try to edit the Footer Text under Style Tools, but you have Custom HTML defined for it, the Control Panel will now let you know, providing a link where you can either disable or edit your Custom HTML.

If you imported a theme through Control Panel > Style Tools > Browse Themes, it would not previously bring over the dynamic text banner settings, in order to avoid overwriting any existing banner. Now, it still doesn't overwrite your actual banner, but it will bring the settings over into your Banner Builder in order to make it easy for you to create a new dynamic text banner with the intended style set forth by the person who created the theme.