Elegos Project To web development... and Beyond!

Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 4.0 is out!

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Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 18:04

As previously wrote, as promised, here it is the new tracker out from the EleGoS Project oven!

The features are already known (I've written about it in the last days), so hurry up and download it, being an update it's free for all who already bought the extension!

If you don't remember the PayPal transaction ID, please log into PayPal and see the details of the transaction, it will be there. If you used the web-accept method (no registration to the paypal website) don't hesitate to contact me asking for the ID, specifying name, surname and date (if possible) of the purchase, always using the support email. The price is still of 2,95€ and it includes both the legacy 3.x and the 4.x versions, but only the 4.x series will be supported code-wise (fixes, features etc).

Remember not to download the extension via Internet Explorer, it will download a corrupted file (I.E. bug), I suggest you to use (the latest versions of) Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

~ elegos

Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 4, development update 2

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Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 14:21

Dear World of Warcraft raiders

This is the second update of how WoW Progress Tracker 4 is being developed.

In this news I'm glad to announce the new extension is near its release. The execution time is far more faster than 3.x series and it includes all the Cataclysm raids and all the previous expansiations raids grouped by expansion. I ended developing it this way due to two things: first of all I take the data from the Armory, in particular from the guild achievements part. This restricts me to the achievements that are showed there. This approach is similar to the previous one, but while the single character achievements sheet is more detailed, the guild one is not. So for example I can't know the heroic progress of a particular raid, but only if the guild has finished it. It's a little compromise, compared with how fast the new system works.

As previously announced, the component is now completely customizable: there are two panels (simple and advanced options), and the customization is all in the advanced tab. If you're still not satisfied you can edit the style.css, file where the things I don't think they are supposed to be changed can be changed. No more css in the PHP files, making hard to edit the graphics.

The module now supports multiple raids per time (i.e. a single module to handle them all, if you want) and during my latest experiments I can say that if you activate all the progress blocks the system is still very fast (depending on the armory speed, it may take less than a second!).

The last thing I have to code is the heroic checks for the ending-bosses of Cataclysm raids (it should be very fast to code this). After that I'll push the module live in my website and include it in the zip file, containing both 3.x and 4.x releases until the old armory will be online.

About the support: I'll continue supporting the old 3.x series extension until the old armory will be online (prompting you to move to 4.x as soon as possible), but I've already abandoned its development (i.e. the "Guild Wide" option is broken due to the old armory not being updated, and I won't fix it as it's a 4.x working feature).

Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 4 development, update 1

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Published on Monday, 14 March 2011 13:13

Dear World of Warcraft raiders

This is the first update of how WoW Progress Tracker 4 is in development.

First of all I'd like to say I've added the Korean armory support as well as ALL the possible languages the armory is written in, this means de, en, es, fr, ko, ru! As some languages require more characters than others, you may have to edit the style.css and update the text size, or make the width and/or height bigger from the advanced menu.

I've added a simple progress text under the name of the raid (i.e. X / Y), it looks cleaner than the bar and it's pretty good in my opinion. To reply to some questions I've received, the tooltip appears wherever you move the pointer on the entire "block", not only on the title. Also currently the tooltip has no interaction, but you can mouse over it even if you go outside the raid block, thus if you want I may add some links or features, just ask me ^^.

I've made the system throttle policy-safe, this means your website won't get banned if you receive too many visits in the same second! ^^ It may slow down the page load by 1 second (10 seconds if 10 users visit the same page in the same time, but it's a really unfortunate case). In any case remember that the system has to download one HTML page per expansion, this means that it will instantly load the page only if you let the module (or modules) load a set of raids of the same content (i.e. Cataclysm), otherwise it will have to wait for one second to ask the armory for another page. I may decrease this wait time to 0.5 seconds to see if the server doesn't get me banned, I may insert an option up to you.

Not having the cache anymore will let you always have the most updated progress anytime!

Unfortunately this system doesn't provide the progress for the old content (Classic, TBC, WotLK), but can only get a summary of what you've done and what you didn't guild-wide (thus you have to redo Black Temple Guild Run to make it display under the TBC progress).

~elegos

Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 4.0.0 in its development!

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Published on Saturday, 12 March 2011 10:28

Dear World of Warcraft raiders

Good news for you!

Blizzard is not gonna release its data-driven web pages to retrieve informations about the progress any time soon. I've waited it since December (when the new Armory went online) hoping in a fast release. This didn't happen. Then I decided to implement my own HTML parser and guess what - during my preliminar tests I was able to parse an entire guild for all the cataclysm raids in LESS THAN A SECOND. Seriously, SimpleXML sucks*!

As of Joomla! 1.6, it's really cool, but it lacks in documents. All the documents I found are about the MVC system, and this means there is nearly no official documentation out (not to mention all the outdated 1.6 alpha and beta tutorials, not applicable on the stable 1.6.0). I won't support this platform until new docs will come out (I don't want to waste 99% of the time just to know how to make the module actually WORK on the CMS). Read more to know the specifics and preview of the upcoming extension :)

*SimpleXML is what I'm using to parse the old armory in 3.x series.

~elegos

Read more: Joomla! WoW Progress Tracker 4.0.0 in its development!