Blog Azeroth

Hi,

I recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 and decided to write a plugin which allows to link characters, guilds, and items to the official armory.

Initial work has been done, and a first release will be done within the next few hours. Thus I am now looking for a few people who would like to test the plugin. It is free, and licensed under the terms of the GPL.

A few more details on what the plugin does are available

• The big plan for the plugin,
• and insight into how the plugin configuration inside WordPress works.
• and the plugin source code released to GitHub.com

Why develop such a plugin when there is scripts for WoWHead, WoWDb, etc. ? Well, because I prefer to a) have a clean solution that does not require any code or template changes in the blog, and b) I prefer to use the original data rather than any 3rd party data.

If you'd like to try it, and help with testing, just leave a reply here.

With kind regards,

Armory lite, and warcrafter.

Would be much faster, but
a: it's third party data
b: i'm not sure if you can use their api.

Armory lite is just a different skin for the original armory, in terms of speed I did not find any issues with the original armory, what makes it slow is mostly the browser rendering the XML reply, not the armory itself.

Since my plugin caches data, a lot of request are saved anyway.

Why warcrafter? For the sandbox profiles?

Out of curiosity, are users using WordPress.com as their platform not able to use this? I know WP has disabled JavaScript recently, so things like Wowhead plugins won't run.

Not yet, the current version still makes use of JavaScript, even though it's only internal and not connecting to external websites.

CSS-only popups might be worth a try, since I'm pre-loading the item and character data anyway before the actual post is displayed.

Edit: a tiny update... the plugin now successfully parses comments, posts, and pages, replacing item and character names with links to the armory. It's configurable, so you can choose which language to use, and it will cache all armory data for a time frame you can choose yourself, default is four hours, as the armory updates every 4th our the earliest.

I'd be interested in testing this, we are trying to move away from GuildPortal into a WP 2.5 install. Also, this would provide a good base for a WP Guild Roster plugin.

Please PM me, and I'd be happy to test.

P.S. A google search pointed me here

I am not sure, if WordPress.com allows you to install plugins from the official WordPress plugin directory it might work. I'll upload the plugin there soon, just waiting for approval of the first version.

I find that my mod fetish extends farther then just my wow install directory... sign me up....i love trying out new plugins for WP

Since I am back from a longer work vacation, I have continued the development of phpArmory and the WordPress armory plugin.

Sources are available for free on GitHub. Those with a Mac or Linux on their WordPress host, can use git to checkout the sources into their WordPress installation. For Windows users, there is a nice (working) download button on the wow-armory plugin page.

I have fixed quite a few issue with phpArmory recently, and added a few workarounds for the armory blocking clients when querying characters, guilds, items too quick.

Have a try, and enjoy the plugin and the armory class. The current API documentation for phpArmory (version 0.3.2 is current) is available here, too.