Addon Corner: Useful Addon Sites and Tips
I’m not going to rabbit on about a specific Addon this week, I thought I’d mention a few of the sites I trawl on a daily basis and other things that are useful when dealing with World of Warcraft addons.
WowAce
I’ve spoken briefly about the Ace libraries and how it benefits addon makers. The WowAce site acts as a repository for almost all the addons that use the libraries. As well as being able to manually browse what addons are there, you can also use their own custom utility.
WowAceUpdater shows at a glance which addons have updates
This tool is called WowAceUpdater (or WAU for short), this enables you to browse, download and update all your Ace addons in one fell swoop, it’s a great little tool with a nice interface.
Curse
Curse are a general MMO portal site but they have an expansive World of Warcraft section including a massive addons section. A lot of addon authors use curse as their main mirror for their addons.
Curse also have a utility (called the Curse Profiler) that monitors when addons are updated on their site, I have it set up to monitor non-ace addons (as WAU updates those for me), it also doubles as an addon itself, uploading character information to your Curse profile if you want it to.
WowInterface
WowInterface doesn’t have the nicest or friendliest of site layouts, it’s based around vBulletin and looks very cluttered, but it does have a few exclusive addons. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Tips
These few tips are mostly common sense but they can save you from tearing your hair out or breaking your monitor in frustration. Here they are:
- If everything is working fine for you, don’t update! Only update if you are experiencing issues (for example after patch days) or there is a new feature that you really want.
- After a patch, if you notice an addon missing or something not working how you expect, double check that you have "Load Out of Date Addons" enabled via the Addon button on the character select screen, most addons work fine after a major patch, but until the author releases a new version you need to force them to load.
Hope this post has been useful.
Tags: addon, curse, mmo, wau, wow
