Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 5 is on the way!

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Published on Monday, 05 September 2011 11:33

Dear raiders,

in these days I focused on scratching a new WPT version starting from the ground. I've opted for a javascript implementation for different reasons, I hope you'll enjoy them all:

  • Battle.net allows a single website to call for approximately 3000 queries to their new API. If it's called client-side, the queries will count as individual ones and not from the web server.
  • JavaScript allows fast and easy JSON / JSONP calls and it's client-side, not server-side, thus preventing both bandwidth and CPU load on your web server

I'm using jQuery as I used in the past, and I decided to use vTips for the tooltips this time. The counter side effect is that the user browsing your website must have javascript enabled, otherwise he/she won't see the progress.

Also HTML5 and CSS3 are being used more and more in new world wide websites and in new templates. I've thus decided to make usage of them, introducing browser-generated gradients (ok, it's not THAT usage of new technology, but anyway). I'm unsure whenever to create backward compatibility layers, but I'll for sure try to make things work on all the LATEST versions of every browser I can test.

With the new API I'm even able to get the detailed progress of heroic modes, switching back to a character-bound logic (from a guild-logic one). In the settings thus you'll have to set a single character instead of a guild. This has two effects, good or bad they can be:

  1. You'll be able to track your personal progress if you like
  2. As of (1), you'll have to choose the most active character in the raid to match 100% coincidence with the guild progress

This is again a Battle.net limitation, as there is no API for the guild progression at all. I've opted to look for one single character 'cause of JavaScript: parsing more than one character may result in slow calculations and bad performance browser-side, which I don't want.

5.x will most probably NOT compatible with J! 1.5, as I'm pointing to the latest (stable) version of the CMS for this work.