WoWWiki levels up

Those of you who have been around for a little while will no doubt know about one of the most useful resources in this World of Warcraft: WoWWiki. If you're new to the party, let me tell you about it. WoWWiki is, as the name suggests, a wiki about all things Warcraft. From boss strategies to patch history to insanely detailed lore, if it's about the Warcraft series, it's probably on there somewhere. And if not, it's a wiki, so you can write it yourself!

The occasion for this particular post is that they have just completed some major upgrades to their software and infrastructure. Here are the highlights:

• WoWWiki is now hosted in a distributed fashion across the Wikia network, which should mean more stability and less chance of catastrophic failure.

• A new default skin, which looks nice and classy.

• The OpenSearch plugin is now working again, so you can add WoWWiki as a search engine in Firefox or IE (though I still prefer Firefox's search keywords). Click on the menu by your search field while browsing WoWWiki to check it out.

• A proper sidebar menu, with links to important parts of the site. This fixes my single biggest complaint about the site, which is that it was hard to navigate.

• The sidebar is also now customizable; users can pick which widgets they want to see over there, and in what order. This is very cool.

• A new version of MediaWiki, which brings many feature improvements and bug fixes.

Head on over and check it out! And thanks to Kirkburn and everyone else who has helped make WoWWiki such a fantastic site.