Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on a new idea for a WoW AddOn that was inspired by my friend Andrew (aka Raski). He was asking me to make an AddOn that would let him keep track of player characters he meets in PUGs for dungeons and raids. Specifically, he was asking for a way to create a database of player character names, class, level, roles and notes, that he could refer to when looking to build a PUG. With this inspiration, the idea for WoWPUGBuilder was born.

As you can see from my initial notes, my design for WoWPUGBuilder has four basic features: a player generated database of character data, an auto invite feature, integration with the built in Looking For Group tool as well as with the built in Calendar feature. From these four basic concepts I tried to expand on it's functionality by describing them in more detail...

... Integrating with the Looking For Group tool, for example, it might be desirable to have the AddOn create and auto advertise a custom built message for the LFG chat channel. Another desirable feature would be to have the AddOn auto invite players that respond with a designated chat message.

At this stage I also did some research into AddOns that might already do perform some or all of the features that I am trying to design into WoWPUGBuilder. I found three AddOns, Headhunter a tool which searches for and /wispers potential party members, Instance Party Finder, which is similar to Headhunter, and Wintergrasp Helper, an AddOn that will auto invite players to a party who message the player with a keyword, such as "invite".

I also broke down the feature list into possible available functions...

...which described them in further detail.

I also took some time to discover what API might be useful in creating the AddOn...

Finally I worked on the UI design...

...which starts to take shape with inspiration from the Wintergrasp Helper AddOn.

Currently I have divided the development of WoWPUGBuilder into four milestones, the first of which will be to get the auto advertise and invite features working. Second, I want to tackle the player generated character database. I've had some difficulty discovering how to set up a database for WoW AddOns but I've gotten some leads over at the WoW Programming website forums. It turns out I that I might have been trying to look up the wrong terminology, rather then "database" the author of WoWProgramming uses the term "Saved Variables". The last two milestones will involve integrating the AddOn with the Looking For Group and Calendar tools. I am still working out in my mind how I would like to design the UI for the database display but I am thinking that I would like it to mimic, in some fashion, the friends and/or guild member lists.

So with this new idea in mind, I'm going to put WoWGuildAlliance on hold for the moment. Even though I had begun work on designing that AddOn, I'm feeling that the challenges of creating WoWPUGBuilder will be compatible with the needs of WoWGuildAlliance's design. We'll see how it goes. :D