UI Clinic: Segment15

The UI Clinic is a series of segments created by Bouvi for The AIE Podcast which help you turn your back on the default UI and create a UI to be proud of.

Welcome AIE

Hello AIE and welcome to this edition of the UI Clinic. For this segment lets talk addon maintenance.

Grab those patient charts, pull up your sleeves and dive in.

Backups

Backing up your UI is important. You never know when a crash might happen or if you want to try out something new but hate it and want to go back to your old one.

There are two folders you need to backup in your WoW directory, interface and wtf. No WTF does not mean what you think. It stands for Warcraft Text File. The Interface folder contains your addons while the WTF contains all of your settings for your characters and addons. Keeping backups of these two files are extremely important. Otherwise you could find yourself spending hours recreating your UI.

Up-to-date

Next up lets talk about keeping your addons up-to-date. Now let me give you a piece of advice my grandfather told me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. To keep it simple the only time I do an upgrade is if something does not work or if there is something new and exciting. There are times when addon authors make mistakes and release flawed code. You auto download it and boom errors all over the place. (see now where the backups come in handy?). Now if this happens to you don't go screaming at the addon author. Remember they do this as a public service. Be nice and they will probably get you fixed up right. Be a jerk and they will probably hardcode your characters name into the code so it always messes up for you (I am joking but if it were possible you get the idea.)

How to update

OK so now I do have a few addons I want to update what do I do? You have a few choices here. Curse.com has their curse client that makes installing addons a breeze, wowinterface.com has MMOUI Minion that does the same thing for their site. Another one is WoWMatrix that used to be king but did so by leaching bandwidth. Bad boy. It still works for a lot of addons though. Any of these are excellent solutions to updating your addons. There is one other method and that is manually updating. Now if you have just a couple of addons this is what I recommend but if you are like me you have a ton and manually updating will take forever.

Time's up

Well that is all the time we have for this episode of the UI Clinic. You can always contact me in-game by doing a /who Bouv (that gets all my toons if I am on) or e-mail me at bouvi@uiclinic.com. Until next time back it up or suffer the pain of loss.