Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Ver. 6.9 Sneak Peak - Development Focus Shifts

The 6.9 release is planned for 11/18/2009.

Over the last 2 months we've been focusing on improving performance and areas where we needed proactive maintenance as Guild Launch continues to grow. The most important of those changes have been released and we are now ready to move back into refining and improving Guild Launch from a functional perspective.

Over the next 6 months we are going to be taking a strong look at usability, fun and making you the user feel like you are kicking ass when using Guild Launch. To that end we will be adding key features, but the brunt of our development effort will be on making our existing feature set more usable, more adaptable, more relevant, more fun and more kick ass. You will find that a great many of these types of changes fit into the "Other Enhancements" area since they are often focused changes.

Version 6.9 has important enhancements and is shaping up to be one heck of a release. The following is a sneak peak into the upcoming changes:

Pool Based Permissions for Rapid Raid

You can now set permissions for each pool on the permission group. So you can let one person Admin one pool and one person Admin another and they can't mess with the other pools.

Aion Legion Roster Imports from AionOnline.com

We're now pulling in Aion Legion roster info from AionOnline.com

Aion Race & Rank Icons

The icons for the Elyos, Asmodians, Brigadier General, Centurion, Legionaire are now being used on the roster.

Major Application and Recruiting Enhancements

You can now enable an option to request character info from an Applicant. If you do this they are presented with the same info as you see during character creation, but the info is shown on the application. This includes Name, Class, Race, Faction and all relevant info.

This functionality works for all games, but for WoW guilds links to WoW Heroes, be.imba and similar sites will be presented on the application and in the forum post. This way you can learn more about the character. We can extend this to other games in the future.

We also have some other items in this area we aren't ready to announce yet... keep your eyes open for the final release notes.

Better CSS Customization

For those of you who know CSS and like to make your own CSS edits editing a file on your desktop, having to name it a certain way and then uploading it definitely didn't kick ass. It sort of sucked.

So, we've added the ability to directly edit the CSS on your site. You get a textbox, you write the CSS directly into it, you save it. Your site uses the CSS. No magic name, no funny business, just easy editing.

Other Enhancements

* You can now put "www." before a subdomain and the site will redirect you to the correct subdomain.
* WoW guilds can now customize the colors for the class in the simple customization editors.
* The Primary Nav now presents and "Edit Links" link on the primary nav. We hope this will help people find this functionality more readily.
* The Guild Site welcome email has been refined.
* Background Attachment options (fixed, scroll) have been added to the Simple Editors and to the Background upload page.
* Where files are listed from the File Library or a reference to the File Library is made in Admin there is now a corresponding link to the File Library.

Other Fixes
* A broken link on the user profile characters tab has been fixed.
* Guild News permissions have been fixed so that those with "Communcations" rights can add news.
* The required status of an Advanced Application question can now be edited.

Performance Enhancements
* The way that some data is stored has been modified to increase performance.