Coralin of Kael’thas

Hmm… it’s a bit early for 2.42 info, since it’s not even on the PTRs yet, BUT…
Undocumented Changes in 2.42
The bit that concerns me is the Mount Speed trinket changes- mount-speed trinkets become Enchants, cast on your mounts. This affects several classes adversely, unless they make this a “sneak-peek” at inscription- since Pallies, Warlocks, and Druids normally don’t use a mount.
Now, the REALLY annoying bit, to me?

Charm of Swift Flight (which will stay a trinket) now also reduces the mana cost of Flight Form and Swift Flight Form by 115 mana

Ok, cool…
Wait…
I use Outfitter to swap my trinket in when I shift to Swift Flight form, and then swap it back out when I shift out.
Meaning, I miss out on the mana reduction.

Personally, IF this story is accurate, and IF they make these affect the pally/warlock mount powers, then I’d like to see us lose the charm as a trinket, and instead have it simply “inscribe” our flight form power…

Well; I guess it all really depends on whether these are accurate or not. Once it’s confirmed, THEN druids can unite, possibly with our pally and ‘lock brethren, in a QQ-fest to shame all QQ-fests that came before… ^_-

Hmm… only thing I can really say about epic flight? WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Heh; but in all seriousness- it is a HUGE difference; epic flight really feels like FLYING- my flight form feels extremely sluggish, now.
Of course, that means it’s time to run my epic flight form quest chain… ^_^

Well; I’m about halfway through my Epic Flight Form quest line, so long as the final battle with Anzu is heavily weighted.

Last night, Twain and I flew over half of outland, running from place to place; tomorrow, we plan on doing the Moonstone quest, and hopefully we can pull together a heroic Sethekk halls group to get Anzu… we’ll see…

Well; I’ve taken the plunge and updated to Wordpress 2.5, and it was a beautiful experience.

It was quite smooth; disable plugins- check. Backup Database- check. Backup files- check. Wipe everything but my config.php, and plugins/itemstats/themes directories- check. Install the new files- check. Run the database upgrade- check.

It’s running beautifully, and most of my plugins are working fine. I had to replace a couple with updated competitors, but I’m quite liking it all. As an example, I’ve gone from an automatic database backup utility to a database utility with automatic backups, optimizations, and more… very nice!
The new backend is a beautiful thing; they’ve collapsed a lot of the options into nice, succinct tabs, with sub-options.

Looking at everything, I think the best way to do what I want with this post (Review 2.5/promote my favorite plugins) is to just go down my tab/option list… SO- With my plugins that create their own tabs, I have the following tabs/suboptions (I’ll give detail for the not-so-obvious ones)

• Write
  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Links- it’s nice to see this in the write section, instead of being a several-click task in the Manage Links section as before.
• Manage
  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Links
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Link Categories
  • Media Library- a new one to me; apparently WP2.5 is including a built-in media library.\
  • Import
  • Export
  • Subscriptions
  • TinyMCE Advanced (Allows me to add/edit buttons on my TinyMCE interface with a drag and drop interface.)
  • Ad Units (From Adsense Manager; allows me to manage/define ads from various services and have them display where I want, on whichever pages I want. Very nice ad management interface.
• Design
  • Themes
  • Widgets
  • Theme Editor
  • AWP Management (Ajaxed Wordpress; the plugin that allows the inline post loading/commenting.)
• Comments - finally got it’s own tab; makes a lot of sense.
  • Comments- similar to the old Manage Comments page.
  • Akismet Spam
• cformsII - my Contact Forms plugin. Very powerful, quite nice… not exactly user-friendly, though, if you don’t like doing a little bit of minor code here and there.
• Database- my Wp-DBManager plugin
  • Database- all the info you ever wanted and then some about your database.
  • Backup Database- Create a backup, gzipped or no.
  • Manage Backup DB- Download, restore, delete, or e-mail a database backup. What’s nice about this tool is that it maintains backups indefinately, so you can have snapshots of your DB from creation/installation of this plugin onward.
  • Optimize DB- Mmmm… nice!
  • Repair DB- Very nice; I hope I never have to use this one!
  • Empty/Drop tables- Hoo… that’s a bit extreme, and I’m kind of shocked that that option is in here, but hey…
  • Run SQL Query- yeah; like I said, a rather powerful plugin.
  • DB Options
  • Uninstall.
• Gallery- my NexGen Gallery plugin.
  • Gallery- it’s got it’s own landing page, with plugin news.
  • Add gallery
  • Manage Gallery
  • Album- combine galleries into albums or slideshows, etc.
  • Options- Paths, thumbnail settings, watermarks, and more.
  • Style- modify the gallery CSS
  • Setup- reset all options, uninstall, etc.
  • Roles- what user roles have access to what options.
  • About
• Settings
  • General
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Discussion
  • Privacy
  • Permalinks
  • Miscellaneous
  • All in One SEO- Search Engine Optimization
  • AA Google 404- Ask Apache Google -enabled 404 error pages.
  • FeedBurner
  • Google Analytics
  • Configure Postie- Significantly enhanced posting options.
    
  • Subscribe to Comments
  • WP Super Cache- I don’t have it enabled normally, but it uses both the normal HTML caching method, and a DB-to-HTML caching method that it claims makes you digg-proof on a shared host… if I ever get a digg, I guess I’ll test that…
  • Yadis- Use your WP Domain as an OpenID host by redirecting openid requests to an openID provider’s server.
  • AdSense Manager
  • XML-Sitemap- Creates an XML sitemap that allows better SEO.
• Plugins
• Users

Hoo; that was quite a bit more than I planned on posting…

Well; we enjoyed the practically-gank-free atmosphere so much, that I’m no longer Coralin of Spirestone…
Nay, I’m Coralin of Kael’thas. ^_-

Hmm; My wife and I have finally just gotten tired of working on a PVP server- mainly thanks to the fully-epic-ed-out rogues that were hanging around the new Blade’s Edge daily, ganking any alliance that tried to complete the quests…
Anyhoo- I’ve been spoiled. I’d forgotten what a pain it can be, starting out without a “Sugar Daddy” character.

Twailight is now Twailight, (currently balance) Resto druid, and I’m Coralin, Shadow priest. We’ve carefully designed our tradeskills to work well together; I’m mining/tailoring, and she’s skinning/enchanting. Granted, we have t rely on others for her crafted leather gear, but we’re getting a decent number of drops, so it’s all good so far. I’m level 15, with an equal amount of gold ^_-

Thanks, Cartographer_Mining and Cartographer_Routes!

I’ll post more, including armory stuff, when I get home… so long as I remember. >.<
(In related news- Clearly, I’m a terrible blogger, since I don’t stick to schedules, make promised posts, etc…)