Background

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) for personal computers running Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X. Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft in 2004, to unprecedented commercial success.

The World of Warcraft game engine has a built-in scripting language, called “Lua” (Portuguese for “moon”). Lua was created at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and is available for any individual or company to use, customize and improve, free of charge. Lua is used in dozens of applications and more than one hundred video games.

World of Warcraft players may freely create and distribute their own User Interface AddOns written in Lua, as long as they follow Blizzard’s UI Add-On Development Policy. AddOns can provide extra information to players, alter the look and feel of the user interface, store and retrieve useful information, streamline in-game activities, and more.

There are several popular websites dedicated to hosting player-made AddOns. I host mine at Wow Interface and CurseForge. Each site has a thriving community of AddOn users and developers, and provides tools to help developers create and update their AddOns. They have easy to use programs that players can install to find and download new AddOns, and keep their existing AddOn collections up to date. I rely on Learning Aid’s users to report bugs and suggest new features via these sites.