Version 6.9 – Release Notes

November 18th, 2009

This release was/will be released on the morning of Thursday 11/19/2009.

Version 6.9 is a huge release with new features, improvements and functionality for everyone.

The release notes are below:

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. You can find the link to import your roster on the left side of the Legion Roster page.

Note: This is brand new functionality that relies on external data from a site we have no control over. It is likely that there are still some minor issues that will arise when we launch this to our thousands of Aion guild sites. If you encounter issues please send an email to support@guildlaunch.com with info about the issue or post on our forums. We will be resolving any of these issues as quickly as possible.

Aion Race & Rank Icons

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

Aion Forum Icons

We’ve caught some flak (rightly so) about the icons in the Aion templates not fitting the template. So, Vicki has fixed them. They are now much more in line with the overall feel of the template. We hope you enjoy them. We feel the new icons are enough of an improvement to force the update. The previous icons are on the Ready Made Icons page on the Template & Customization tab in the Admin area if you would like to go back to them.

Major Application and Recruiting Enhancements

1. Collect Character Info

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.

2. Guild Site “Invites”

You now have the option to send an Invite to any user who’s profile you view from your site. This will allow you to click an “Invite” link on their profile and to send a PM to the user with a clickable link to your Guild Application process. This will allow admins with Manage Applications rights to send invites to anyone who has posted in your forum. This will allow you to have recruiting turned off but to still privately recruit. This will also make it so you don’t have to remember the link to send them to or save it somewhere the system will instead provide that info.

GuildOx.com Guild Ranking

A GuildOx.com widget is now avaialable. This widget display Realm Rank and World Rank for 10 man, 25 man and 10 man strict as well as points. The widget can be configured to only show 10 man, 25 man, strict and points and any combination of those.

There are also 3 other Widgets related to this:

1. World Rank
2. Realm Rank
3. Region Rank

These 3 widgets can be configured to show 25 Man, 10 Man and 10 Man Strict or any combination of those.

Rapid Raid – Item IDs on WoW Items

Rapid Raid now allows you to add an Item ID to an item. If an item ID is provided it will be used instead of the item name to get the item hover. This removes the need to get the item ID from WoWHead for items with multiple iLevels for the same name.

When importing a raid the Item ID is entered automatically by the import. You will no longer have to reenter items that have multiple iLevels.

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.
* The Inital DKP page now has a reset option
* The Lytebox image popups have had the “Auto Resize” option turned on. This will resize the image to fit your browser window if necessary when it first loads.
* Certain “Your need to login” prompts that were previously sent to the main GuildLaunch.com site are now kept on your guild site. This should improve the user experience. If you find other non-admin areas that kick you to the GuildLaunch.com domain when you need to login please let us know at support@guildlaunch.com, but this should be the last of them.
* City of Heroes Currencies have been added to the Guild Bank

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.
* An Error in the way that “Raid Eligible” settings were being handled has been discovered and the setting for marking all new characters as Raid Eligible (the default) will now be correctly followed.
* The Widget headings for one of the Aion templates has been set to properly have a the heading decoration. The decoration was missing for some widgets.
* An issue causing some headings for widgets to display oddly has been fixed.
* An error message has been fixed in the File Library that previously kept users from knowing that they were attempting to overwrite an existing file.
* Display issues in the Aion templates with the widget headers have been resolved.

Performance Enhancements
* The way that some data is stored has been modified to increase performance.
* Some JavaScript has been moved on the page to improve the perceived load time.

Enjoy!
Stephen

Ver. 6.9 Sneak Peak & Development Focus Evolution

November 6th, 2009

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.

Enjoy!
Stephen

New, New Blog for Guild Launch

November 6th, 2009

This is the New, New Guild Launch blog. We decided to ditch blogger for a myriad of reasons. Primarily you now stay on the Guild Launch domain so we can keep the conversation going here instead of on multiple sites.

We’re looking forward to making more regular long form blog submissions.  Tweeting is great, but we’re geeks here… some things take analysis.

Enjoy!
Stephen