Today is MMO Guildsites 2nd birthday!

It has been two great years, and we truly appreciate all of the support we have received from you guys in that time! Just like our first birthday we have some great prizes to hand out to you guys, but first a quick recap of the past year.

Our 2nd year has been a blast! We have continued to improve many of our features, including revamps and enhancements to our Theme Editor, Permissions System, DKP section and our Admin Panel to name a few. Some of our features such as our Theme Editor have really grown to the next level and we're quite proud of them. We actually have over 200 public themes created with our Theme Editor now, many of them created by you guys, and many of them are amazing options =)

Along with a lot of polish we have been hard at work adding new features as well. This year saw many new additions including a Videos section that hooks into Youtube, Groups, Progressions, an Awards section to reward members, and recently Guild Alliances allowing cross-site features between guilds; as well as many game specific features such as character profiles for Warhammer and item tooltips for Lord of the Rings Online, and many more small additions.

It really was an amazing 2nd year for us, and like a fine wine (or an MMO!), we continue to improve with age =) Now... onto the prizes!

As we mentioned last month we have purchased 3 Mini Laptops and 5 Amazon Gift Cards to hand out as prizes; these prizes were all randomly drawn and any site owner with an active site was eligible.

1x Blue Acer Aspire One Mini Notebook
Linpus Linux Lite OS
Intel Atom 1.60 GHz Processor
512MB DDR2 Memory
8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 high-brightness Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD
120GB Hard Drive
High-definition audio
Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam
10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet LAN
Acer InviLink 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Sapphire blue


Winner of the Blue Acer Aspire One: Riders of the Riddermark

1x White Acer Aspire One Mini Notebook
Linpus Linux Lite OS
Intel Atom 1.60 GHz Processor
512MB DDR2 Memory
8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 high-brightness Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD
8GB NAND flash storage
High-definition audio
Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam
10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet LAN
Acer InviLink 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Seashell White


Winner of the White Acer Aspire One: Highly Offensive

1x Green Asus EEE PC 2G Surf Mini Notebook
Linux Operating System
Intel Mobile CPU
512MB DDR Memory
7" WVGA 800x480 Widescreen LED Backlight LCD
2GB Solid-State Disk
High-definition audio
10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN
802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Lush Green


Winner of the Green Asus EEE PC: [Dark Sentinels] of WAR

5x $40 Amazon Gift Certificates
$40 Gift Certificate - Redeemable for millions of items at http://www.amazon.com


Winner #1 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: The Hard Biscuits
Winner #2 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Security Guild
Winner #3 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Apollo
Winner #4 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Pent Up God
Winner #5 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: LEGENDARY

Congratulations to all the winners! (if you won you will be receiving an email from us)

Those were all the prizes we have to hand out this year, we would have loved to have more, but if you never won keep an eye out next year as we hope to do this again for our 3rd year!

We would again like to thank everyone for choosing us as your guild hosting provider, and allowing us to continue to run this site for 2 years now! The feedback, suggestions and promotional support we receive from you guys is amazing, and we greatly appreciate it! =)

We have a few game specific updates for LOTRO, WAR and WoW this week, along with an enhancement to how we handle external resources.

LOTRO Item Tooltips
Item tooltips for Lord of the Rings Online are now enabled on the site. They work exactly like our Warhammer and World of Warcraft item tooltips. For Bank and DKP items they are automatically enabled, mousing over the item's name will show the tooltip. To enable the tooltips anywhere else on the site you can just type:

[item]Fine Radiant Hat[/item]



The item bbcode button has been enabled above Text Fields for LOTRO guilds as well, which you can click and will auto insert the bbcode for you.

WAR Europe Character Profiles
Character profiles for WAR europe guilds are now enabled, pulling data from the european realm war site.

WoW Death Knight Profiles
Our WoW Character Profiles now properly support the Death Knight class, having the proper avatar and talent icons.

External Resource Enhancements
We allow you to connect to a lot of external resources with your guild site; character profiles connect to the armory and realmwar sites; rss blocks connect to their origin site; and ventrilo and teamspeak blocks connect to their server to read their status.

Previously if any of those external resources were slow to respond, it may have caused your site to appear to load slowly, as it waited for the WAR character profile to load, or the RSS feed to be read in.

Now all of these external resources are managed much better. RSS, ventrilo and teamspeak blocks are all pre-cached, and their cache is constantly updated on our server, so the attempt to connect to the external resource never happens while visiting your site. And WoW and WAR character profiles now show your character page right away, and the connection for the profile is made as an ajax request.

Just in time for Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion we have several new WoW themes to add to the site!

Lirad (Blue and Green Versions)

Theme Details: Lirad Blue, Lirad Green

Poder (Blue and Green Versions)

Theme Details: Poder Blue, Poder Green

Darc (Yellow and Red Versions)

Theme Details: Darc Yellow, Darc Red

We have had many great WoW themes created by our members, so be sure to browse through the WoW related tags on the themes page. And also remember these can be used as base themes, any of the public themes can be loaded into the Theme Editor and fully customized!

With Lord of the Rings Online's new expansion due this month, we wanted to release some official LOTRO themes to provide more options for spicing up your site!

Eme (Red and Brown Versions)

Theme Details: Eme Red, Eme Brown

Litro (Blue and Grey Versions)

Theme Details: Litro Blue, Litro Grey

Aferia (Brown and Blue Versions)

Theme Details: Aferian Brown, Aferia Blue

Also remember we provide you with a full theme editor you can use to create your own themes and edit any of the existing public ones. The public themes section is a great place to find a base theme which you can then tweak, customize and personalize for your guild; just click the "Load" button next to any theme and it will allow you to fully customize it, and after you're done you can then apply it to your guild site =)

Our Alliances update is now live, adding new communication features to the site for guilds who are in Alliances!

To create an Alliance, you would login to your Site Admin and go to the Alliances tab, then click "Add New Alliance"; a popup will be shown asking you to type the url to the site you wish to ally with, auto complete will help you to find the site you are looking for:



One you have selected the site, a Pending alliance will be listed in your Site Admin, awaiting the approval of the other site. Once the other site approves the Alliance it will then be active.

Features of an Alliance
With an active alliance, members from your site can login to theirs, and members from their site can login to yours. Alliance members belong to a new limited account type, "Alliance", which you can configure in the Permissions tab, and belong to a new view level, "Alliance", you can use to control what forum/poll content they can see.

Who's Online
The Who's Online block has been updated to include Alliance members. Alliance members display similar to your regular members, except clicking their name will take you to their profile on their guild site, and the color of their name can be configured to be different in the Theme Editor. (in the example screenshots Allied members have been set to Green, while regular members are Pink)



Event Signups
Alliance members can signup to Participation events on your site, allowing you to plan events with your Alliance and see who can show up from all of the guilds within the alliance.

Private Messaging
Private Messages can be sent and received from Alliance members. Your inbox works as a global inbox, so you do not need to login to an Allied site to see private messages from them, you can just login to your own site and will see any pms you have; and you can send PMs to allies from there as well.

Forums
Forums can now be shared among alliances. Any forum category or forum thread set to the "Alliance" view level will be available to your alliance members. Forum Categories/Threads set to Member will be restricted to your Guild Members only.

*note: Previously the default view levels for forums were Guest for viewing, and Member for writing. This has now been updated to Guest for viewing, and Alliance for writing. This is because if you are not in an Alliance, Alliance and Member are the same thing; and if you are in an Alliance, you typically will want to allow participation from your Alliance on most forums, with only certain ones limited (which you can do by setting those to Member or higher View Level).

Polls
Alliance members can now vote on your polls. You can restrict what polls they may access by setting a view level higher then Alliance to the poll.

Shoutbox
Alliance members can now post on your shoutbox, allowing for some quick chatting between sites.

All of the Above is Optional
All of the above permissions for Alliances are optional. You can configure what your Alliance members are allowed to do on your site in the Permissions tab of your Site Admin. If you do not want Alliance members to be able to use the Shoutbox, it can be turned off for them, same with the other features.

Alliance Color Configurable In Theme Editor
You can set the color for Alliance Members to show up on your site in the Theme Editor; by default it is the same as your Member Links. If you open the Theme Editor you will see there is an "Ally" link you can click to set a color for. Severed Pinkies will be going through all of her themes today to update them to have separate colors for Members and Alliance members, so if you are using one of her themes you can just re-apply them.