Posts Tagged ‘phpBB3’

Master Blogging and Altitis Birthsday

So after a significant slowdown to my posting activities, this is my 300th post on Altitis. Incidentally, the blog is also 1 year (and 10 days) old now.

Before moving on towards 400, let’s take the opportunity to review some facts both interesting and trivial about this place:

  • Collectively, my Damage Meter benchmarking series are what interested most readers, attracting slightly over 10’000 pageviews over time. While I can’t make any promises, I intend to get back to these “soon” to check where we stand now that the landscape has stabilized and the new combat log feature is almost ironed out.
  • My Parrot review remains the most popular post not part of a series, followed quite closely by my CowTip review.

Interestingly enough, as the wow blogosphere always makes a point of mentioning this kind of things, none of the above have ever been mentioned by wowinsider, and for that matter, haven’t been linked to from other blogs. The readers all come in through search engines, 98% from Google.

A quick review of phpbb3 combined with a mention of wowdb comes next in popularity, although I suspect most visitors to that page leave disappointed. From the search terms used, visitors were mainly interested in phpbb3 wow themes, not my short review & ramblings. Well, for wow-themed phpbb3 styles, here’s a short list:

There’s likely to be more out there if you want to google around but the above sampling should give you a good starting point.

My two most popular rants are tied to the Ghostwolf nerf, and I have mainly Mania to thank for that, as most viewers to these pages come from her blog.

One of my oldest theory posts still attracts a decent amount of viewers every day, the second one in the Defense Theory series which explains how PvE defense works, in particular for tanks.

Now for some other interesting or odd stats:

  • Last week, Altitis ranked second in Google for clicked queries on wrath talent trees (in fact I’m still second as I write this). There’s definitely a hunger for information on the matter out there. Unfortunately for visitors looking for this kind of information, what they get here is my post on how I believe it is too early to engage in in-depth discussions about wrath talents.
  • Some people are apparently still interested in my clumsy attempts to write my own armory crawler in php.
  • To the three people looking for Stop the Warrior: although we both are frequently commenting on each other’s posts and sometimes shouting out (or at) each other, his blog is over there. And while we’re at it, his GM, who holds a (probably deserved) bad opinion of me, has her own blog as well, and if you’re interested in insights into how guild management works in a serious raiding environment, you should have her on your blogroll. No excuses, go subscribe now.
  • What gives honor in AV? Killing other people of course, but also burning towers, holding onto towers until the end of the match, killing the opposing Captain (that’s either Galvander or Balinda depending on your faction), protecting your own captain until the end of the game, killing the enemy general.
  • Armchair from treehugger: dunno what you were looking for, but it sounds hurtful.
  • Casserole FFXI: sounds tasty
  • Cheese Conspiracy Theory: Yes, the good old mystery about the Darnassian Bleu still hasn’t been solved.

While there’s a lot of additional sassy keywords in here, this is probably enough of self-congratulation for a single post. As always, allow me to thank everyone of you for reading and commenting on Altitis, it’s your silent or outspoken presence which gives this blog a reason to be.

On Similar Matters

Speaking of Item Tooltips, a Look at WoWDigger

Over the current wowdb popularity, I neglected to look at the other non-Affinity wow item database, wowdigger. And they also happen to offer item tooltip syndication, and apparently do even up the ante in terms of provided functionality.

To wit:

Including their own tooltip syndication script in your template will also enable the use of the [item] BBCode by default, so the editing feature I found handy with phpBB3 isn’t even necessary for this specific purpose.

But that’s not all they have to offer. Wowdb’s tooltips (and from what I gather the affiniy sites do that as well) will also work on skills / spells, but as an additional touch, wowdigger also offers the [spell] code for additional clarity.

Of course, nothing prevents you from using normal html links instead of the two BBCode tags, but the additional functionality is definitely there.

Last but not least, and here’s the killer feature, there’s an additional option which allows you to override any item links pointing to the other major databases with wowdigger’s tooltips. Why is this handy? Simple. Your blog or your forum may have had item links to wowhead before it joined Affinity Media for instance, or your DKP site package uses itemstats pointing to Allakhazam. Using this feature will ensure you get consistent, single-source tooltips without needing to rewrite any old URLs or go hacking into Itemstats or similar tools.

Beyond my personal distrust of their past or perhaps even present ties to gold sellers, there’s definitely one good thing coming out of IGE / Affinity Media’s snatching of Thottbot, Allakhazam and Wowhead. The competition isn’t sleeping, and the results of their efforts to keep up and even surpass the juggernaut brings along better products for us all.

On Similar Matters

Guild Forums, First Look at phpBB3

The guild website I’m hosting hasn’t had a proper template refresh for over a year now, and revamping that one is next on my todo list. I am running it under the quite complete phpBB Plus package (made by the German phpBB community),  based on phpBB2.

In the meantime, though, phpBB3 has been released, and it has a couple of very interesting features making it worth sandboxing for a while.

First and foremost, it’s a lot simpler and easier to read the code, gone are all the good tables for layout old-style, and here comes modern fluid code based on <div> and CSS2. The Admin control panel is a lot better in my opinion, and the board is easier to manage.

For Portal functionality, mods (or hacks) are still under heavy development, but it looks like there should be two or three solid choices available within a few months.

That being said, there’s one feature included in the stock distribution which alone makes it definitely a very interesting proposition for a wow guild forum: the possibility to add new BB code tags on the fly, in a very nice, clean and simple editor.

phpBB3 Code Editor

The screenshot above show it all. And why is this handy for a WoW site? Item Popups.

So far, to have full item popus including proper rarity colouring, you had to spend quite some time to install ItemStats and get it to work. You could of course add a simple syndication script like those offered by wowdb or wowhead, and ask your forum users to manually colour the link, but that’s putting additional burden on the users. ItemStats, last time I played around with it, required even more tweaking when you wanted to make sure your item popups weren’t coming from Affinity Media sites (which I am boycotting).

Here it gets much simpler. Provided you have the item syndication script in the header of your active template, all you need to do to create a new tag for your item links is enter the following into the editor:

[item={TEXT1}]{TEXT2}[/item]

in the top field, and in the lower one:

<a class=”wowdb-item-full-small” href=”{TEXT1}”>{TEXT2}</a>

And there you go, you now have a functional [item] tag for your phpBB3 board. Of course, the above example is based on wowdb and if you opt for another source, specifics may vary, but I found the simplicity of it all pretty nifty.

For your guildies, all they have to do is look up the item in wowdb, then do [item="your link here"]itemname [/item] and it will get the proper popup, the proper colouring and in the above example the proper item icon as well.

Cool stuff.

On Similar Matters

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