Content Syndicated by GuildPortal.com (c)2001-2008 Axiom Shift, LLC

Customization Enhancements

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:05:00 GMT

Greetings!

Many enhancements have been pushed to the production web servers over the past few weeks, including a more uniform appearance across content types (especially forums), new style options, in-line help for many areas of the Control Panel, and controls for those who use Custom CSS to help them with building their style sheets (by providing a selectable list of existing GuildPortal-used style classes and another for the more common attributes used when building stylesheets).

Across the Control Panel, uniform controls for selecting colors and selecting images for the appearance of your site (including the custom gradient builder) have been put in place.

The new Control Panel home (the default page that opens when you click the Control Panel link) has been replaced with something that lists out the more common tasks.

In Styles & Colors, a new type of navigation option is available under Tab Bar Styles called "Horizontal Full Bar," which has many more customization options and is a bit less archaic-looking than the current default "Horizontal Tab Bar" (if you don't have custom images to use, check the new one out!).

Also in Styles and Colors, under Forum Styles, new options are available for background colors and images for both the header columns and individual forum items.

The Content Boxes style settings have been expanded to include a new setting that provides the ability to specify the background color of rows used in grids, when a users move their mouse pointers over them. You can see this most visibly in the Forums content type, but as we continue improving content across the board to adopt more of the behaviors (and not just styles) uniformly, it will become more a part of the overall interactive "feel" of your site.

As always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Site Updates

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:28:00 GMT

Throughout the Control Panel, admins may notice new controls appearing for creating things like custom gradient images for backgrounds of things like their content box title areas, and improved color selection controls. This is part of an overall re-working of the style tools, in order to present an easier way to create better looking sites.

In addition, they are a precursor to a new option for site navigation (to add to the existing options of standard tabs, image tabs and side site nav), which is currently in development and will be released "soon". =)

As always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Network Maintenance

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:50:00 GMT

On December 18th, 2007 at 1:00 AM EST, the image storage server network will have upgrades performed on all core routers. This will be done one router at a time and due to network redundancy, minimum downtime is expected. The duration of the upgrade is anticipated to be 3 hours.

Though the procedure has been rehearsed and timed on test equipment to verify duration and to test procedural order and contingencies, please be aware that unexpected outages are always a possibility.

Thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

SOE Rosters

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:28:00 GMT

Sony has posted notice that the Station.com services will be offline for between 14 to 24 hours today, so EQ and EQ2 XML Rosters will not be functioning. More here: http://maintenance.station.sony.com

Hands-Free Armory Roster for World of Warcraft

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:47:00 GMT

GuildPortal now supports direct, hands-free automatic roster functionality for guilds playing World of Warcraft! This is accomplished by integrating directly with the World of Warcraft Armory, which is provided by Blizzard.

In order to enable the Armory roster, add it to your site in the Control Panel (Site Pages -> [your roster page] -> Add Content). It's the first item in the list, called Armory Roster for WoW. You configure the integration options using a new link in the Control Panel called "WoW Integration" (it's bolded and shows up on the left by default when you open your Control Panel). Click enable, verify your guild name, click save, and you'll be good to go with the new roster that requires absolutely no add-on!

For those who do not play World of Warcraft, please feel free to smack your game company's web development team around a little bit, encouraging them to make in-game guild data available via XML over the web, and we'll be happy to write integration code for it so you can have the same kinds of goodies!

File Uploads

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 07:14:00 GMT

Hey all,

File uploads will be unavailable throughout most of today, and access to files already uploaded may be spotty as well. This is being caused by our move to a new image hoster and, while we had it all planned out so as to avoid any interruption in viewing/accessing your current images, it looks like the old host is on its last legs.

Thanks for your patience and, as always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Image Hosting Services

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Hey all,

As most of you have no doubt noticed, file/image hosting has been down for most of the day. Depending on your site's navigation options, you may or may not have seen the scrolling ticker with updates as to the status of getting that particular service back online.

Right now, it looks like it was a hardware or operating system problem, and the server is being restored to a point where it will be functional again. Where we go after that is probably going to be in the direction of finding a new host for that particular server if the existing host cannot provide 1) a detailed explanation of exactly what went wrong and 2) assurances that some kind of fault tolerance will be put into place to keep it from happening again.

Thank you all for your patience as we work through this, and as always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Updates and Upcoming Updates!

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:20:00 GMT

Recent updates:

The WYSIWYG editor has been replaced with an updated version that works with Mac clients, including a new in-line spell checker.
Some portions of the site have been made a bit Ajax-y. Read more about it at the blog (linked at the end of this item).
The images content type, aside from defaulting to a scrolling display of the most recently added images, now has a link underneath it to open up a full image gallery for the guild.
GuildPortal updated to latest non-beta version of its underlying framework (opens door to some pretty neat enhancements).
Much work has been put into security.

To read more, including some bits on what to expect moving forward, head over to the development blog. Thank you for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Security Enhancements

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:17:00 GMT

As of June 7th, 2007, GuildPortal is undergoing a security lock-down while we evaluate individual types of script and active HTML elements such as embedded Iframes, objects, etc.. We will be announcing more soon on the news page (http://www.guildportal.com/ShowNews.aspx), such as work-arounds and new, more easily formatted -- and more secure -- custom tags that you will be able to use in place of straight HTML.

This is in an effort to make the vandalizing of your individual guild sites more secure against users who have been granted access to post content on your pages (via your Control Panel, usually). Members burning the bridge on their way out and the like. Keep in mind that you can still have embedded pages (which produce IFrames) by using the "Embedded Pages" content type.

We thank you for your patience while we work to continue earning your trust in GuildPortal and as always, thank you very much for choosing GuildPortal as your guild's home on the web!

Updated WoW Add-On

aaronlewis@guildportal.com (Aaron Lewis) — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:56:00 GMT

The GuildPortal Guild Info add-on for World of Warcraft, which makes keeping your guild roster up-to-date with the latest on your guild members through the WoW Auto-Roster content type, has been updated to the lastest patch. It is available here.