CPG Dragonfly™ CMS

Roster Master for Dragonfly provides a method to integrate your EverQuest II Guild Roster into your Dragonfly CMS site. It works by "Web-Scraping" Sony's site, parsing the data, and storing it in a local database.

Roster Master for Dragonfly is a port of the Roster Master module originally written by Rex "SaintPeter" Schrader. Significant enhancements and exclusive features have been made for the Dragonfly CMS version, as well as to accomodate changes in Everquest II and the EQ2Players.com site.

About Roster Master
Roster Master provides a method to integrate the Sony EverQuest II Guild Roster into your Dragonfly CMS site. Fully integrated into the site, you can manage and view your guild's data right from your portal. A block is also provided that displays guild statistical data similiar to that found on the guild summary page on the EQ2Players.com website.

Roster Master: Guild Roster Manager

• Allow your CMS users to "Claim" his or her characters
• Character "Type" Tracking
  • Compliments and expands upon the "Guild Rank" feature
  • Users may specify if their character is Primary, Secondary, or Utility
  • Option to list Primary characters only
• Guild Roster Single and Double Column Sorting
  • Sort by clicking on a column header, or select two columns from a drop-down (i.e. Class, then Level)
  • Reversible Sorting for both sort modes
  • Optional column sort indicators displayed in table headings
• Optional Grouped Listing

Quest Master: Quest Tracker and Query (Dragonfly Port Exclusive!)

• Track Heritage, Access, and Timeline Quest progress for your claimed characters
• Query quests to list characters at each quest step
• Features an exclusive scrolling/resizable JavaScript Table
• The table can be resized by dragging the horizontal rule
  between the bottom of the table and the table footer up and down

Signature Master: Dynamic Signature Generator (Dragonfly Port Exclusive!)

• Dynamically create graphical signature blocks automatically from information stored in the roster database
• Features a unique caching system to reduce wasted server resources and poor client performance issues

Automatic Instantiation (Dragonfly Port Exclusive!)

• Multiple instances of this module can be created by making a copy of the module directory and adding an underscore followed by an integer to the name of the directory (e.g. "Roster_Master_2"). The module will detect this and automagically configure itself
• Blocks follow the same pattern

Guild Wall of Fame Block (Dragonfly Port Exclusive!)

• Display guild statistics and information in your Dragonfly CMS blocks
• Many display configuration options

Guild Summary Information (Dragonfly Port Exclusive!)

• Guild Level displayed in Roster
• Statistics and other information available in block

SQL Backend Cache

• Fast display since you don't have to hit Sony's site every time
• Configurable cache refresh time

Update Logging

• Have a record of changes in all fields, every user add, and every user deletion
• Log data update failures and retries
• Configurable, log as much or as little as you wish

Error Messages

• Explanatory error messages for common failures
• Clean exits

Fully Documented, Clean Code

• All functions completely commented
• Advanced users have access to more advanced options and configuration within the code source
• Open-source, released under the GNU General Public License

Completely Dragonfly Compliant

• Roster Master has been ported to Dragonfly with an expanded feature set
• Easy to Setup and Install
  • FTP, configure, set permissions and go
  • No .sql file to import, just run the installer
  • Install, backup, uninstall, and upgrade right from the Dragonfly control panel
• CMS Username to Character Name Mapping
• Includes Dragonfly's localization support (English and French language files included)
• Leverages the CMS' features and security

NOTE1: This module requires outbound HTTP connectivity to the everquest2.com Website on TCP Port 80. Make sure your server can connect outbound, or the module will be unable to function (characterized by "FATAL: Gave up trying to contact the guild summary page." and "FATAL Gave up trying to contact the roster page." messages in the logfile). Fedora Core users (possibly others) will need to edit the /etc/selinux/targeted/booleans.local file and add "httpd_can_network_connect=1" (without the quotes). Other systems may need similiar changes. Read the httpd_selinux(8) man page for more information on this if your system uses this feature.

NOTE2: Do not use Dreamweaver to edit the Roster Master or Dragonfly PHP files, there are known issues with Dreamweaver that can cause file corruption and complicate troubleshooting. Use a plain-text editor (such as Notepad or WordPad), or a programming editor, such as jEdit.

NOTE3: The Guild Wall of Fame block stores a copy of its output in the "content" field of the "{prefix}_blocks" table, and pulls from there rather than re-run all the queries (until the block needs to be updated). This works perfectly well until the stored block exceeds the TEXT field type it's stored in which has a maximum length of 65,535 (2^16 - 1) characters. This condition would pretty much only exists if $config['breakdown_shownames'] = 1, since the block stays a constant length that's within the limits of the TEXT field. Also, people with very small guilds, can possibly duck under the limit, even with it enabled. To work around this, the Roster Master installer will change the field type of the table from TEXT to MEDIUMTEXT. This should have no impact on the operation of the Dragonfly CMS core, or to database efficiency. However, please note that if you subsequently upgrade the Dragonfly CMS core, there is a good chance that the CMS installer will revert the field type back to TEXT, in which case it would have to be remedied once again by hand (using whatever SQL management interface that you are comfortable with).

NOTE4: To parse XML with PHP, you must configure PHP with the --with-xml argument prior to make and make install. If you compile PHP as a module for Apache 1.3.9 or later, PHP will automatically use the bundled expat library from Apache.