Our Permissions Update, a major revamp to the existing permissions system, is now live! We have had many requests for more control over permissions, and this update now puts a lot more power in your hands with how you want your users to be able to access your site.

Account Types
Different Account Types have been added. An Account type describes the type of user visiting your site, such as a Guest or Member, and they have a set of default permissions you can configure. For example the Guest is restricted only to viewing content, but you can now choose which content on your site they can view.

Here is a screenshot for editing the Guest Account:



For now there are only two account types: Guest and Member, but in the future we will be adding at least two more, which are Applicant (for members who have applied to your site, so you can grant them certain permissions, such as being able to view their own application), and Networked Member (which is for members from a Networked Site, such as an Alliance, which is an upcoming feature)

Customizable Permission Roles
A Permission Role is a set of permissions that you can assign to your users and ranks.

How the permissions system used to work is we created several permission roles for you, which were Guest, User, Trusted User, Moderator, Admin and Super Admin. They had certain permissions enabled and we allowed you some flexibility in declaring additional permissions to them as well, but they were not customizable and you could not create your own.

With this update, now you can! Permission Roles are now completely customizable and contain all of the possible permissions for your site so you can go very detailed with your permissions if you like. Now you can do things such as create a Banker role that has special permissions to the bank without also having to hand out admin priviledges to other sections of your site.

Here is a screenshot for editing a Permission Role:



Customizable View Levels
A View Level is an additional view/use restriction placed on certain content on your site, such as a forum thread. Previously they were wrapped into the Permission role, but as those are now customizable, so are the view levels.

There are 6 different view levels you can name, by default they are Guest, User, Trusted User, Moderator, Admin and Super Admin; which match the default roles. You can rename them to anything you like.

Please note that view levels are ordered, meaning that someone with View Level 5 can view any content from View Levels 0-5; and someone with View Level 3 can view any content from levels 0-3 but cannot see content from levels 4-5.

Any Questions/Issues With This Update?
If you have any questions or notice any issues with this update please send us an email - staff@mmoguildsites.com =)

Our rollout of Warhammer features continues, and today we're presenting you with War Character Profiles!

Just ensure in the Site Admin Settings tab your game is set to Warhammer Online and your server is set to your server, and then when you try to view a character on your guild site you will see its full profile:



*note: this is currently only available for the North American servers, as it pulls information from the realmwar site; once the realmwar site is up for the european servers this will also be enabled for there.

** extra note: character profiles are cached for 24 hours once they are created, so you will only notice updates once a day

Warhammer Online Items have been integrated into the site using WarDB's syndication feature. This adds the following features:

Item Tooltips
You can now type: [item]Warlord Bulwark[/item] anywhere on your site and it will convert it into a item tooltip when someone mouses over it; this works in the shoutbox, forums, pms ,etc. There is also a small "items" icon above textareas you can click on that will insert the [item] tags for you into your post.

Bank and DKP Integration
Items added to the Bank and DKP sections of your site will now automatically pull information about the item for you, creating tooltips and embedding info. Here is an example screenshot of a raid item from the dkp section:



*note: because we changed some stylesheets, if the tooltips are not displaying properly for you, you may have to press F5 to force your browser to grab a fresh copy of it

We pushed live a small update this morning to add a Warhammer Online Server Status side block =)



You can enable it in the Layout tab of your Site Admin.

Our latest update is now live! We dubbed it our "Polish Update" as it mostly focuses on adding polish to existing features on the site.

Site Admin Updates
Every page of the Site Admin received some UI updates, to make them more clear and easier to use. The Races and Classes which was previously under the Settings tab got moved to its own tab, and each page was refactored to make better use of the side panel. We won't go through all the changes here, but the page which changed the most we want to cover in more detail: the Layout tab

Site Admin - Layout Tab
The Layout tab is where you add side and homepage blocks to your site, and it has grown quite a bit since we first launched, now containing more than 50 different blocks you can add. To make the UI more user friendly with all these new blocks we have grouped them up and added them to the side panel:



So while we have 7 different DKP side blocks, they are all grouped together and shown as simply DKP on the side panel. If you click the DKP block, you then get the option of which view you want to add:



And if a block has no extra options, it is simply added to your layout without showing the popup, making the Layout tab quicker and easier to work with =)

New Comments Block!
A new block is now available to be added to your site, the comments block! It will show by default the comments from all of your content (images, videos, journals, events, raids, raid items); *note: it will not show comments from guild applications or groups. You can also configure the comments block to only show comments for certain content (such as just images, or just videos).



New View for Images Side Block
The images side block now has a new view "Latest Images", which will show the last 5 images added to your site with thumbnails:



Improved Views for Videos Blocks
The videos blocks were updated to match the style of the new latest images block, and include small thumbnails of the videos



Instant, HTML emails
Previously our mail server only sent out mail once a minute, meaning if you did a password reset you had to wait up to a minute to receive it; and the email was in plain text. Email is now sent out instantly, and if your mail client supports it, it will come as an HTML email with some pretty formatting =)

Focus Improvements
We have gone through the site and made focus improvements everywhere we felt they would be helpful. For example when you click on "New Forum Thread", when the popup form is displayed, the subject field will now have focus so you can just start typing, rather then having to click it first. We have gone through all the popup forms and added focus to the first field you would type in, so this should make it a little quicker to use =) Some focus improvements were also added elsewhere on the site, for exampe after you shout in the shoutbox now, the focus is set back to the new shout field, so you can shout again if you like without having to click there first.

Popup Form Usability Improvements
Along with the focus improvements we have done some usability improvements to the popup form also. An example of this improvement is previously after you added a new forum thread the popup box at the bottom would say "New Thread Added; click here to add a new one or here to close"; generally this was un-necessary, after you add a new forum thread you typically do not want to add another one right away, and in most cases you want to check your forum thread to ensure it is correct, so after you add a forumthread now you are simply redirected to it.

Warhammer's NDA dropped yesterday, so today we have a fun tool to help keep you occupied until launch - the Warhammer Career Planner! =) The Career Planner allows you to pick a career, it lists your masteries, and you spend points to determine what spec you want for your character.

Check it out here: http://war.mmoguildsites.com/career_planner

Using the Career Planner
The Planner assumes you are level 40, and have 25 points to spend. To spend points click the "+" icon below a tree.

You do not gain abilities simply by putting points in the tree; you must also buy the abilities if you want them, making the trees actually 22 points to fully purchase, and not 15 like you may think.

Once you have enough points in a tree the ability will light up to show it can be purchased; then you can click the ability to buy it and click it again to unbuy it.

As you put points into trees, it will improve all the abilities in that tree; the tooltips for each ability updates as you put points in the tree so you can see the difference they make.

A few quick notes:
Currently it is destruction only; order is up next and should be live in a few days Update: order is now live =)

We are releasing this early, expect it to receive quite a few enhancements in the near future making it even more awesome!

Update 2: We have added a section to the bottom of the career planning, listing all of the skills for each career not included in the above trees, so you can have a better overview of what abilities are available to the career

The progressions update is now live, adding another section to your guild site and a new block.

Progressions track the progress your guild has made towards a goal. With this update we support two types of progressions: checklists and amounts.

Checklists


The checklist option allows you to specify a number of steps, and check off the ones which are complete. An example use of this type of progression would be to track your progress through a dungeon, checking off which bosses you have killed.

Amounts


The amount option allows you to specify a number of steps which each require a certain amount of something to be complete. An example use of this type of progression would be to track the materials you need to build a keep for your guild, or the materials you need for a special profession or raid.

Progressions Page


A progressions page has also been added to your guild site, at http://yoursite.mmoguildsites.net/progressions. It is more meant as a place to manage your progressions, with the idea progressions would mostly be shown via the blocks, but it can serve as a history or way to view progressions for your guild also.

Once you have created a progression you can add the progression block to your site and choose the progression to display with it from the block's options.

Whats Next?
We will be doing a round of general polish to the website, working on several enhancements we have in our issue tracker, such as the "Mass Add" feature for DKP and improvements to the admin panel. Then we will be working on our item tooltips update, improving them for WoW and expanding them to work with other games.

While the update last week added quite a few new features to the DKP section we received some feedback from users about changes they wanted to see; in response to this we have pushed live another update tonite to the DKP section, aiming to improve it further based on your feedback =)

30 Day Attendance
30 Day attendance, along with the Lifetime attendance, is now shown on the Attendance page and the Raider details page, for guilds wishing to track DKP by the past month.




DKP In Member and Character Profiles
DKP has been re-enabled in the Member and Character profile pages. If a character's name matches a raiders name, the raiders dkp will be shown there; and the Members dkp tab will show an overview of each of their chars dkp.


Item Links Themable
Item link colors are now themable in the Theme Editor, by default they are set to the notice_text color, to match how they were displayed before, but you can customize them in the theme editor now.


Adding New Raid Remembers DKP System
When adding a new raid, we now check the DKP system of the last raid you added and use that as the default for your new raid. So if you are only using zerosum, you will not always have to select zerosum when you add a new raid, it will be set for you automatically.


Performance
This past week you may have experienced poor performance visiting your site, especially the DKP section; this was due to a combination of issues in the DKP update we put live that was causing issues, and us applying hotfixes throughout the week to address them.

With this update, any performance issues should be gone, and working with the DKP system should be quick, even when you are working with a large raid or have a lot of DKP data for your site.


Further Enhancements
We are planning to do one more pass of polish on the DKP section before moving on to the Progressions update, adding a "Mass Add" feature to the Raid Edit page; if there is other enhancements you would like to see let us know and we may be able to include them with this next update =)

The DKP update we have been working on for over a month is now live! =) This update is almost a full rewrite of our DKP section and contains a ton of enhancements, polish and new features.

Characters -> Raiders
As mentioned in our preview of this update, DKP is no longer associated with characters but will be associated with raiders. To support this, there is a new Raiders admin page to manage your raiders.

The Raiders admin page allows you to create and edit your raiders. You can delete raiders but only if they have no DKP data associated with them. You can also flag raiders as active or inactive; inactive raiders will not show up on your standings or attendance pages or blocks.




Raider Pools
You can now create Raider Pools. A Raider Pool is a collection of raiders that consider their DKP to be one source.

An example use of a Raider Pool is, if Joe's Main is the tank Beefskewer, but he switches to his alt healer Zagdush to help out the raid, any DKP he earns with Zagdush he wants to count towards his main Beefskewer. A Raider Pool can then be made for these two raiders, and their DKP can be viewed together in the raids section.

Raider Pools should only be used if you need them, as it will complicate your DKP section more; and in most cases in the above example you could just manually add the DKP from Zagdush to Beef. But if you are using an automated DKP method such as CTRaidTracker, the pools can help then, since the addon will pick up both characters and include them in the XML; but if they are pooled then you do not need to worry about editing it later.


Raid Pools
Raid Pools are another new feature with this update. A Raid Pool allows you to pool raids together so you can treat their DKP separate from other DKP.

An example use of a Raid Pool is if you raid multiple dungeons, and one dungeon is easy and has lower level loot, and another dungeon is harder and has higher level loot; you may not want your raiders to be able to earn DKP in the easy dungeon, and then spend that DKP in the harder dungeon. So you can create a separate Raid Pool for the harder dungeon, and track it so only DKP earned from that dungeon may be spent there.

Raid Pools existed previously as "Raid Sets", but they were more obscure and harder to use on the site; they have been given more UI attention and should make it easier to view DKP in different Raid Pools throughout the DKP section now. If you were using Raid Sets before they have been converted to Raid Pools for you.

*note: It is not in as part of this update, but limiting the amount of Raid Pools you can have is something we may do in the future; for example limits such as 5 pools for standard, 10 pools for pro and 20 pools for premium. The reason for this is that each raid pool causes a great deal of extra calculations for the raids section.


Enhanced Standings Page
The DKP standings page has been updated to include Raid Pools and Raider Pools, and has received some polish, highlighting the column you are currently sorting by.




New Attendance Page
This update also includes our new Attendance page, which shows the attendance for all of your raiders in one page, It includes counts of the amount of raids the raider has been on versus the total raids, along with a percentage representation; and the attendance can be filtered to be shown only for a specific raid pool.

*note: one feature we wanted to include with this update was the option to filter attendance by time; this unfortunately was taking too much time to complete so we have delayed it to a future update. For now if you want to see recent attendance the best option would be to group raids into a raid pool and view the attendance for that raid pool




Greatly Improved Raid Edit Page
The Edit page for a raid has seem many improvements. Previously, an edit option was not available for much of the data entered into a raid; if you made a mistake entering a raid item you had to delete it and then re-add it. No longer, everything is now editable =) You can edit raid events, raid items, raid adjustments and raid hours.

A more compact UI is now in place for the Edit Raid page, making it easier to work with raids that have a lot of data. Some of the information has been tucked away in the edit popup to make the page cleaner and easier to work with.



The edit popup has been made consistent and works nearly the same for editing raid events, raid items, raid hours and raid adjustments, which should make the raids page easier to learn and faster to work with.




More Informative Raids Show Page
The details page for a raid now contains more information; adjustments for the raid are now shown on the page and comments are allowed.


Raid Items Have Their Own Page
Raid Items now have their own details page, which includes an embedded tooltip, a history of the past drops of the item and comments for the item.

*note: currently the embedded tooltips are only available for WoW, but we have some exciting plans for this for other games we will be announcing soon =)




Raider Details Page Enhanced
The raider details page now contains more information, showing points and attendance for each raid pool as well as their global totals. It also shows the raiders entire raids and items history you can paginate through.




All DKP blocks Updated
Our DKP blocks you can add to your site for the home and side columns have been updated to take advantage of the new Raid Pools feature. When you add the blocks to your site, you can pick what raid pool they will show content from, so for example, the Most Current block you can pick to have it show the points from only a certain pool; or show only the latest raids or items from a certain pool.




Default Raids link renamed to DKP
We initially choose to call the DKP section Raids, and made a default link in the Navigation you can enable called Raids that points to /raids. This has caused some confusion for users not knowing it is the DKP section, and as we are looking to support future systems like Loot Council or generic Raid tracking without DKP, we have decided to rename this to DKP,

The default link is now called DKP and points to /dkp, which is the DKP Standings tab. If you prefer the old method, you can create a new Menu Item in the Navigation tab of your site admin, call it Raids and set its url to /raids, and then disable the DKP link, and it will function exactly as before.


Improvements to XML Upload
Our XML upload (originally mentioned here - http://www.mmoguildsites.com/blog/47) feature now supports Raid Adjustments. The format for adding adjustments with the XML upload is:

<adjustments>
<key1>
<reason>Late</reason>
<amount>-5</amount>
<attendees>
<key1>
<name>Beefskewer</name>
</key1>
<key2>
<name>Rhazul</name>
</key2>
</attendees>
</key1>
<key2>
<reason>Early</reason>
<amount>3</amount>
<attendees>
<key1>
<name>Ruol</name>
</key1>
<key2>
<name>Malkor</name>
</key2>
</attendees>
</key2>
</adjustments>

Update: Albert suggested in the comments below the XML upload feature create raiders if they do not exist on your site yet using info from the XML; this was an excellent suggestion and is now live on the site =)

Support for DKP Addons Intact
The addons our users have helped create or make work with MMO Guildsites will still continue to work amidst all the changes to the DKP section; these include Phaye's Complete Addon, DKPmon and CTRaidTracker.


*Special Note on Deleted Chars With DKP
With the old DKP system, DKP was associated with characters, and it was possible to delete characters. If you did this it left the DKP associated with a ghost reference in most cases, showing the text of the deleted chars name and their DKP for that raid, but you couldn't click on it and they wouldn't show up in the standings.

With our new system, DKP is associated with raiders, and raiders with DKP can never be deleted to avoid these situations; and we have reinstated deleted chars who had DKP as raiders on your site. Because of this you may notice some old raiders show up in your standings; to hide them go to the Raiders tab and then click the green icon next to their name to switch them to inactive.

Let us know what you think
This update drastically changes several parts of the DKP section, and we'd love to hear what you think so we can keep enhancing the site and making it even better; post in the comments here or send us an email at staff@mmoguildsites.com

The Awards update is now live, allowing you to create your own Awards with their own icons!



Create Your Own Awards
You can now create your own Awards to hand out to members. Along with the name and description, you can choose to use one of our default award icons or upload your own.

Change Existing Awards
Along with creating your own awards you can change any of the existing awards

Awards Menu Item
The Awards section has been moved out from a tab under the members section and into its own page, still available at /awards. A menu item for "Awards" is added in the Navigation tab of your Site Admin now which you can enable.

Improved Layout
The awards list page has been modified to look more like a list of awards, and each award now has a show page, that will list all the previous winners, shown below: