Developing an interface for the WoW Armory

When Blizzard Entertainment released the World of Warcraft armory in March 2007, the player base quickly separated into one half being angry and the other half being pretty much exited. You either have to love it, or hate it. With my blog back to life, I decided to join the forces of the armory lovers.

While preparing a few articles I noticed that I have quite a few mentions of items and characters in my posts, and what could be nicer than making these items and characters visible for my readers without requiring them to browse to another website? Sure, it is not a must have thing, but it is a convenience which adds a bit to the overall feeling. So I decided to start developing a plugin for the recently released WordPress 2.5 which I use to create my blog.

Before jumping into my favourite text editor it seemed like a good plan to blog about the plugin, in order to describe what I want it to do, and how it should work. Having a plan is a Good Thing™ as many may remember from software engineering courses.

What do we need?

• item links: the ability to edit our posts, pages, and comments and turning item names into nice item tooltips, just like they look when you mouse over an item in the game client.
• character links: in the game client, you can SHIFT-click on any character name you read in chat, and the game client will print the basic character data like name, race, class, level, and current zone. It would be nice, to sign posts or comments with the character name and have a tooltip display the basic character values.

What would be nice to have?

• full integration with WordPress 2.5+: WordPress 2.5 comes with a lot of revamped administrative features and AJAX support. I’d love to have the plugin make use of that. E.g. AJAX for pulling of item and character data from the armory and dynamically adding the tooltips where possible.
• caching of character and item data: yes, we all know it. Both the game realms and the armory have maintenance schedules and thus downtimes. Since it would suck to have no tooltips, the plugin should cache all data it has received from the armory. This has two benefits: it saves bandwidth for items we already have seen, and in case the armory is down, we still can have sexy tooltips.

What we do not want to miss?

• automatic installation and removal of the plugin: everything should be free of work for the user. The plugin should install itself without requiring user interaction, and it should remove itself without requiring interaction, plus it should clean up before it leaves the house.
• sane defaults: there are actually only a few options for such a plugin where a user might want to make a choice. There is the US armory, and the EU armory. The armory is available only in a few locales, not in all locales you can have your WordPress configured for, and the user might want to decide if he wants a file based cache, or if he would like to use the already existing WordPress database.

Did I miss any feature or requirement? Nothing comes to my mind yet, but if you have any suggestion add a comment and get to talk with me.

What next?

I have already built a basic framework for the plugin which is active and running in this blog. As you might notice once you open this sites HTML source, there are already a few lines added by the plugin for the AJAX tooltips, and a small style sheet for the visual look of these tooltips.

Currently the plugin can pull data for characters and items from the armory, but it yet lacks a display function. I am still working on the configuration screen, as I do not want this plugin to require you editing PHP files. According to the WordPress developer documentation, this would suck anyway.

Expect an initial release on Saturday. I hope some people will volunteer for testing.