Aaron Lewis

GuildPortal Dev Blog

Updates from Aaron Lewis, GuildPortal Code Monkey

Entries From Aaron Lewis' Blog

10/10 Roll-Up

Posted 10/10/2012 9:59 AM by Aaron Lewis. 133177 reads. Share:

Many enhancements have been incrementally rolled out since the last release announcement. I'll summarize what's been going on, minus a lot of the minor bug fixes:
  • New Feature Promotion Letters. Whenever a member is promoted to a higher level, you can replace the default system-sent mail with your own custom one, and you can have a unique letter for every level. For example, you can have a different letter sent when someone is promoted to member versus when someone is promoted to officer or council. Get started with promotion letters in Control Panel General Promotion letters or Guild Bar Admin Member Management Promotion Letters.
  • Enhancement New World of Warcraft roster with in-game WoW Guild Achievements. Configuration-free, fast sorting and filtering, more frequently updated, real thumbnails of your characters.. Stay tuned, more new stuff for WoW is on the way.
  • Enhancement WYSIWYG editor file selection/uploading. The editor tool for selecting an image has been revamped to function much like the file manager in the Control Panel. However, you now have additional buttons: one to add media (sound, video, etc) and another to add Flash content. All three tools allow for direct upload while editing your content.
  • New Feature User uploads from WYSIWYG Editor. Previously, there was no way for members to upload images or any other media for use in their forum posts. Now, they have access to the three tools mentioned above, but all of their uploads are stored in a special sub-directory off the guild root with the format /MemberUploads/memberid. That is their root directory, and they can create sub-directories, drag-and-drop copy files, and directly edit images (add text, skew, rotate, crop, etc). They cannot, however, see the guild root folder or navigate to the root of other guild member folders.
  • Enhancement Page Footer. The old page footer had a pretty low limit on the number of characters it allowed. This limitation has been eased up, and you may now also specify a background gradient fade and the top edge color and size for the footer area. If you want a solid color instead of a gradient, just select the same color for both the start and end colors. Control Panel Style Tools Page Footer or Guild Bar Admin Site Customization Footer.
  • Css For those who use custom CSS, the class for the new footer area is gp5-footer.
  • Enhancement 8 new GuildWars 2 themes have been added.
  • Maint Some of you may have noticed the new error reporting form you are taken to when you encounter a run-time error. Many of you who have, have filled out the "what were you doing when the error happened" field, and I just wanted to drop a quick "thank ya" for doing so. The details you provide, along with the actual error details, are both put together to automatically create a new support ticket, which is assigned directly to -- waaaaaaaait for it -- development. Anyway, it makes getting to the cause of a problem much easier and has resulted in many hotfixes over the past month! Oh, and to the individual who typed in "I was sleeping".. lol
Finally, a bunch of bugs were fixed.

Mods System goes Live!

Posted 8/26/2011 2:04 PM by Aaron Lewis. 26628 reads. Share:

The new Site Mods system goes live with today's update! From the Control Panel, select Site Mods. From there, you can install them on your site, or even author new mods for others to use. A mod is any combination of HTML, Javascript, and CSS code that come together to enhance the functionality of a site it's installed on. They can be full-blown widgets, or code that makes snow fall down the screen during the holidays. They can even have configurable code so that authors can provide variables that an admin installing a mod on their site can change in order to customize how it behaves.

Widget authors can create widgets, and when they make changes, they create new revisions. Each mod (and further revision of the mod) will be reviewed by GuildPortal staff before being made available for installation (although the author of the mod may always install the latest revision, even if it's not approved, in order to test). Mods can also be given star ratings and comments by the community! After many years of awesome admins providing guides and help when it comes to extending the functionality of GuildPortal, we're offering this in hopes of making that development (and deployment) process much easier -- we're looking at you, Mottie!

Of course, for the scripters out there, the jQuery library is already available, and you can easily use it from your javascript code in your mod! Also, we look forward to providing service end-points that return JSON or XML guild data that can be easily consumed by a mod using simple jQuery get requests, and sample code to go along with it. Think of it as a light-weight API for writing your own widgets or extending GuildPortal to your specific needs, and then getting massive kudos for doing so.

Now, aside from that excitement (can you tell we're excited? huh??), we also pushed the following changes with the update:
  • Sign-ups may now be deleted by event admins directly from the sign-ups listing when viewing an event's details.
  • Aion integrated rosters are now working again.
  • Buncha other stuff for support tickets.

Many Updates

Posted 6/1/2011 12:54 PM by Aaron Lewis. 17681 reads. Share:

  • New: "Newest Members" widget now available. By default this is included below the forums on new guild sites.
  • New: "LOTRO Server Status" widget now available for Lord of the Rings Online guilds.
  • New: Fade animation for background color of grids with alternating colors for odd and even rows. Can be disabled in Control Panel > Style Tools > Content Boxes > Grids.
  • New: It is now possible to add a comment when adding a transaction using the guild funds widget (previously, you had to edit the transaction after creating it).
  • New: Setting the margins at the top and bottom of your banner image is now possible in Control Panel > Style Tools > General > Banner.
  • Updated: "Latest addition" column in the guild bank widget made wider.
  • Updated: Signups table in event view of the calendar now shown with slightly smaller text.
  • Updated: "Edit/Delete" link added to the beginning of each transaction in the guild funds widget.
  • Fixed: When importing drop from a list of previous drops for an event, the description was not being brought over.
  • Fixed: WoW Integrated Rosters were unable to parse Battle.net for EU guilds.
  • Fixed: Add New Forum window in the forum editor was appearing above the top of the editor in FireFox.
  • Fixed: When posting, the option to subscribe to replies was being ignored.

GP Update: Long List of Updates!

Posted 7/22/2010 2:29 PM by Aaron Lewis. 10043 reads. Share:

We've been pretty busy over the past week! Here's a list of some of the things that have either already gone live or are going live with today's code push:
  • 28 new themes have been added!
  • A problem with the signature generator import galleries redirecting to the guild home page has been fixed, and the signature generator has had some neat new features added to it.
  • Importing a theme was automatically centering the banner, even if that was not how the theme was configured. This has been fixed.
  • Auto-forum posting of applications, where an admin had previously (at any point) checked the box to disable it, remained disabled and the box wouldn't show as checked when they went back, so they were unable to re-enable it. Those who were affected will need to go back into the Application Questions area of the control panel and re-enable it by un-checking the box.
  • Integrated rosters for DAOC have been updated to work with the new XML structure that Mythic is returning, and they have been updated to have all the features of the integrated rosters of newer games (client-side filtering, sorting, and an updated appearance).
  • When applying a theme, users have the option to send a quick "thank you" note to the author of the theme. If you like their work, let them know!
  • When sharing a theme, custom HTML for the left, right and center widgets will now also be exported as part of the theme, and applied to any site that imports the theme. Previously these elements were not applied, so only simpler themes could be shared to their full effect.
  • Custom CSS additions are also now copied when sharing a theme. Keep in mind these are just for the "CSS Additions" part of your total custom CSS configuration. Total CSS replacements are not copied. CSS Additions only add on to the existing output, they do not completely replace it.
  • If you have supplied custom images for your tabs, you now have the option to have them display even when using the "Side Nav" type of navigation. Click the "Display Tab Images Inside Side Nav" checkbox in the Control Panel, under Style Tools > Navigation Style (make sure you have Side Nav selected from the drop-down list at the top). This will display the images vertically (top to bottom). Full default/current/hover functionality is supported.
  • Many, many new sets of forum icons are available. You can get to them via Control Panel > Style Tools > Forum Icons. Select from the "Available Sets" drop-down box and click Preview to check them out!
As always, thanks for choosing GuildPortal!

GP Update: Champions Online Integration Goes Live!

Posted 3/30/2010 2:24 PM by Aaron Lewis. 23646 reads. Share:

Champions Online Super Groups now have rosters that are full integrated with Cryptic's XML data feeds, providing hands-free, up-to-date roster info on members of your Super Groups.  You don't need to do anything to activate it.  If you have a roster widget on any of your guild pages it'll already be updated to the new one.

The roster will match any characters entered by your members in their Characters/Settings, so that any medals you have awarded will show up right alongside them.

However, if an admin of a site decides that they want to revert to the standard GuildPortal roster instead, it can be done by clicking the Edit button at the bottom of the widget and checking the box to disable integration.