NetherGuide: The complete guide to NetherPanel features and configuration
Summary
NetherPanel is a World of Warcraft manager written by Lhunath.
It currently has the ability to install and update or remove Ace addons, upload data from your World of Warcraft addons to online web applications and provides easy shortcuts to things World of Warcraft players often use.
The Basics
NetherPanel really isn't complex at all if you don't care for anything beyond the basics.
- You need just one click of a mouse button to update all your addons.
- NetherPanel can be set up by your guild such that it completely configures itself for you upon launching; there is absolutely no learning curve.
- Browsing and installing new addons is a piece of cake.
The Launcher
The very first screen you'll see when launching NetherPanel is the Launcher.
It features a few buttons that provide access to a few commonly needed things.
- Launch World of Warcraft: Clicking this button will start World of Warcraft. If you choose to configure the way you want to launch World of Warcraft in the settings panel, you'll need to launch World of Warcraft like this for those settings to be applied.
- The Whole Works: This button activates The Whole Works which is basically a one-click maintenance button. It will execute your upload configurations, check for addon upgrades, fix broken libraries, and install all addon upgrades and libraries they require if you do not yet have them. All this happens step by step, fully automated.
The three buttons below those on the Launcher link to web pages. From left to right, they send you to: Your guild's homepage, your guild's roster and your guild forums. The first and the last need to have their URLs set in the settings panel. NetherPanel will derive the link to your guild's roster from your upload configuration that uploads character data to it, if you have one. If an URL is unknown, the button for it will be grayed out.
The Panels
NetherPanel has a lot to offer. All its functionality is grouped in panels. Each panel specializes in a certain feature.
You can see several icons in the bottom-right of the NetherPanel window. Switching between panels is as easy as clicking a panel's icon:
In this screenshot the first panel is activated. This is the Launcher. These are the panels the icons will take you to, in order:
- The Launcher: Easy access to commonly needed things.
- The Addon Manager: Install, update and remove addons.
- The Scheduler: Schedule NetherPanel actions to happen automatically at certain times.
- Upload Configurations: Upload World of Warcraft addon data to online web applications (eg. WoWRoster).
- NetherPanel Settings: Configure NetherPanel to your liking.
- The Log Viewer: A progress report of what NetherPanel has been doing. Look here if you think something went wrong!
- The License Viewer: Shows the licenses that govern NetherPanel. Make sure you understand these.
- The Changelog Viewer: Shows a list of changes that were made to NetherPanel since its birth. Handy to see what has been changed since the last version!
The Addon Manager
The most important feature in NetherPanel is its ability to install, update and remove addons. All this action goes on in the AddonManager, the second icon on the panel bar.
The AddonManager has a lot of features packed into it, but you really don't need to worry about those unless you want to actually take advantage of them.
Let's start by explaining what the numbers in the screenshot refer to.
- The AddonManager toolbar: This toolbar provides buttons for all actions you can perform on the addons.
- The Progress Bar: The progress bar shows you what NetherPanel is currently up to and how long it will take to complete. This is not just a feature of the AddonManager but is in fact used by any action you trigger in NetherPanel.
- The Addon List: This is a list of all known addons. The list if provided by several AddonProviders. Currently, NetherPanel supports two AddonProviders:
- AceAddonProvider: This AddonProvider enumerates all addons available through the Ace addon repository at http://www.wowace.com.
- UniAdminProvider: This AddonProvider enumerates all addons added to your guild's UniAdmin, if you have one configured.
- The Search Box: This input field allows you to quickly jump through the long list of addons to the addon whose name begins with the characters you typed in. Press enter a few times to jump to the next addon that matches your current search terms.
Just click every addon that you want to install to select it and press the toolbar button that reads Next Step.
You'll be brought to the next view of the AddonManager. While addons that need to be installed are being downloaded, NetherPanel shows you a list of details about these addons. These details describe exactly what NetherPanel is going to change about these addons as they are upgraded. Note that nothing has been done yet! The addons are just being downloaded and you are shown what will happen when you proceed to the next step: Applying the changes.
Settings
Let's skip ahead a bit and forget about the schedule and upload configuration panels for now. After the AddonManager, the settings panel is the next most important panel in NetherPanel.
Here you can configure nearly any part of NetherPanel to behave the way you'd like it to. We'll take it from the top and explain every section of the settings panel briefly for you.
The first section in the settings panel controls the way NetherPanel looks. Depending on how much you value looks this may be either a nifty section to play with or utterly useless to you.
- Color Themes: Color themes are used to change the way the NetherPanel window is colored. Feel free to experiment with the available color presets or pick your own color with the last button.
- System Tray: The System Tray feature will create a NetherPanel icon in the system tray. Through this icon you can access NetherPanel's features without needing to open its window. With the System Tray enabled, closing the NetherPanel window will not shut NetherPanel down but leave it sitting in your System Tray.
- Start Minimized: When you toggle this function on, next time you start NetherPanel it won't open the window but either leave it minimized or hidden in your System Tray if you have that feature enabled as well. Setting this option and enabling the System Tray might be handy for you if you'd like to start NetherPanel when your PC starts. This gives you easy access to NetherPanel's Launcher buttons without needing to first start NetherPanel.
- Always On Top: Don't ask me why, but some people like to keep a window on top of all others. To satisfy these people, there is this feature which I personally find somewhat useless.
- Verbose Errors: Enabling this option will make the log panel a little more verbose (this verbose output might confuse you if you're not used to Stack Traces) but it will also show you what happened if you uploaded your character data to the WoWRoster and something went wrong by showing you the error output of the WoWRoster in an internal web browser window.
The second section deals with some basic settings that NetherPanel needs for good operation.
- World of Warcraft: In this text box should be the location of where you have World of Warcraft installed. Normally, NetherPanel can detect this automatically for you. It tries this with several different methods. If it couldn't find World of Warcraft for you, you'll need to input the location yourself or browse for it by pressing the looking glass icon.
- Homepage URL: To make the Guild Homepage link on the Launcher panel work, fill in the URL that button should open in this field.
- Forums URL: To make the Guild Forums link on the Launcher panel work, fill in the URL that button should open in this field.
The third section allows you to configure several more advanced settings to do with NetherPanel's internal operation.
- UniAdmin URL: To enable the UniAdminProvider, you need to provide NetherPanel with the URL of the UniAdmin web application you want it to use. If you don't know what this URL is, ask your guild. If they don't know either, there probably isn't one set up by them. Either persuade them to set one up or leave this empty.
- Language: NetherPanel can be translated into several different languages. If your native language is not English and you'd like to change the language NetherPanel uses, look through this list for your language. If it's not there you should contact me and ask me how you can help translate NetherPanel to your language. I will be very grateful, and all other NetherPanel users that speak your language will be more so.
- Ignore Changelogs: Enabling this option will stop NetherPanel from touching changelogs that are often added to addon zip files. These can stack up over time, though; so you might want to leave this option off so NetherPanel can clean old ones up as new addon versions are installed.
- Ignore Pattern: Use this field to specify a RegularExpression? pattern that will be used to identify files you don't want NetherPanel to touch. Perhaps you've added a few custom files in one or a few of your addons and you don't want those to change as the addons are upgraded -- in that case you'll want to use this feature.
- Ignore Repositories: Check this box if you want NetherPanel to stay away from addons that reside in SourceControl? repositories like SVN, CVS or GIT. This is mostly used by addon developers.
- Clean Up Unknown Files: When this box is checked any files in an addon's directory that are not in the addon's ZIP file (and are not ignored by any of the previously mentioned rules) are deleted during addon upgrade. You normally want this on so that old files from the addon are cleaned up when they are removed from the new addon version's ZIP file.
- Use the Ace SVN: Turn this on if you want the addon list to include addons from the Ace repository provided by the AceAddonProvider.
- Autodetect WoW: NetherPanel tries to detect what your World of Warcraft folder is if it doesn't know yet. To disable this function, uncheck this button -- though I honestly don't know why you'd want to do that.
Finally there are several fields for you to enter your proxy server information, should you use one. Normally, NetherPanel should be able to autodetect this if you use a proxy server. Feel free to play around with this if you know what you're doing.
The last section that provides configurations for NetherPanel deals with how you want NetherPanel to launch World of Warcraft when you click the icon in the Launcher.
