Alrighties… this will probably answer most of the emails I have been getting about my User Interface. The layout at the bottom of my screen is made possible by using the addon called eePanels. Those are pretty much the black boxes you see at the bottom of my UI, where I drag all the rest of my UI into, to make it look pretty and organized. You can download it here at WowAce.com.

Creating a Panel
When you move to the New Panel option, there are two choices: Global Settings and Default Settings. Default settings will basically just create a panel on your screen based on the addon’s default settings. Global setting will create the panel based on any global value settings you’ve set. Create one.

Moving a Panel
You can either move the panel by changing the panel’s Horizontal/Vertical , or unlocking the panel, and start dragging them around with your mouse. By default, the horizontal (x), and vertical (y) position of your panel is based on the panel’s top-left corner in relation to the bottom-left corner of the game screen. Also note, if the panel’s highlight color is yellow when it’s unlocked, then it can’t be moved by mouse. Only blue-green colored panels can be moved.

Resizing a Panel
You can resize a panel by changing it’s Height or Width values. You can just enter pixel values for the the height and width. You can also resize a panel by unlocking the frame, and drag the frame from the bottom-right corner and stretch it to the size that you want.

Global Settings
The Global Settings option panel displays some of the options available for each individual panel. These options allow you to modify the settings of all existing panels, and any new panels created from global settings. This allows you to easily create panels with all the same size and settings to make it so that all the panels aren’t all different sizes (unless you wanted it so).

Using Gradients
It doesn’t have to be black, you can pick any color you want. Just select the color that is right for you.

After creating you panels, simply move around your UI to the way that you want it. This will most likely take some time to make it exactly how you want it, so be patient. You may have to resize your panels multiple times to assure that that everything fits nicely in each panel. Also note, that most mods have some sort of ”Transparency” option to make the mod appear “clear” so when you place it in the panel, it will look like it is seamlessly integrated.

Experiment with the mod, and have fun with it. There are alot of UIs out there that make use of this mod to create some really nice looking UIs.

Also, there is a way that you can use your own Background Texture for your panel. Taken from WoWAce.com:

Using Background Textures (Images)
If you want to modify the background texture/image, you’ll first need to turn on the ‘Advanced Mode’ switch to have the options available to you.

Textures must be in .tga or .blp format (I suggest using tga), and must be uncompressed, 32-bit depth (which is 24-bit + alpha). The size of the texture must also be a power of 2. Some examples of valid image sizes are: 16×16, 32×32, 128×256. I believe there’s also a maximum size limit of 512×512. These are all restrictions imposed by the WoW game client, not the addon. These requirements must be met in order to display an image/texture.

To set the texture, you need to specify a path to the texture file. For instance, if you wanted to set the texture to the icon used by eePanels, you could set the texture to: \\Interface\\Addons\\eePanels\\icon.tga. If you want to supply your own texture, place the texture in the eePanels directory, and use the same format.

By default, the icon will stretch to fit the panel. This is because tiling is turned off by default. If you keep tiling off, you’ll need to modify the height/width of the eePanel so that it has the same ratio of the texture so that it doesn’t look distorted.

Tiling stops the image from stretching. Instead, the image will duplicate itself across the panel as many times as possible, based on the tile size. The tile size will set the size height and width of the texture to whatever pixel size you’ve entered.

Important:The background color/opacity/blend mode all affect the texture’s visibility. If you know the texture is right (for instance, you’re using my icon image above), but can’t see the texture, make sure the panel is transparent, or that the blend mode is set how you need it. It’s also possible if you have tiling enabled that you’ve set a tile size so large, you can’t actually see the image. Double check these settings.

 

I haven’t tried using my own background texture yet, so if you want to try this, I won’t be much help to you if you run into any problems.

Here are some eePanels alternatives if eePanels doesn’t have what you are looking for

TenUI and Sunnart