A friend introduced me to a free online MMORPG called Secret of the Solstice. He started to play the game after having spent two and a half years playing World of Warcraft. His will is stronger than mines; I returned to WoW not once, but twice after calling it quits.

But, I am always up for a bit of MMO gaming. Secret of the Solstice is a bit anime-ish and the movement is decidedly jerky but its decent for what I expected. The game is actually more of a grind than World of Warcraft, but not much thought needs to be devoted.

There are four noob classes with each getting a rebirth of sorts after so many levels, similar to how the Black Belt in Final Fantasy becomes a Ninja after finding the Rat Tail. The Squire class leads to Knight >> Warrior >> Warlord. Apprentice leads to Mage >> Wizard >> Archmage. The Neophyte class can branch into two areas of expertise. On one hand it can go through the shadowy branch to become a Rogue >> Assassin >> Shadow Master. Or it can go towards becoming a Scout >> Archer >> Ranger. The healing Acolyte can choose to be a Cleric >> Priest >> Paladin or become a Disciple >> Templar >> Holy Avenger.

Having decided on a class, you can choose to do the given quests or just grind on mobs to level. There are 120+ levels to go through and close to 130 areas to explore. Parties can be made of eight people and there are bosses to fight. Gear, items and skill books drop randomly from monsters or can be purchased in store. There are also a new level of classes in the works as well.

I am currently playing a Squire and the class plays like a defensive-spec warrior. Quite boring. So, I am double-clicking mobs and waiting for their deaths, when I thought to myself, this game needs its own wowhead–a repository of items, npcs, mobs, and areas.

I spent a few days and cobbled together a rudimentary clone of wowhead. Unfortunately, I did not have a free domain to put the site on so I decided to make it into a WordPress plugin. I always wanted to make a WordPress plugin, but I just could not find the time. Thus, this mini-project killed two birds with one stone.

The administration section of the plugin took 1000 lines of code while the public portion took close to 200 lines which I copied to 7 template files. I have a new found respect for the admin-tool developer at work. Creating admin tools is hell.

Check out the repository either through this link or by clicking the SotS button at the top. Future updates will include pagination for the pages and a more comprehensive collection of items which is also dependent on how much time I invest in the game.