What is MayronUI?

MayronUI (commonly abbreviated to MUI) is a graphical user interface alternative for Blizzard Entertainment’s popular World of Warcraft (WoW) MMORPG. More specifically, it is an addon pack consisting of three core MUI-specific addons (MUI_Core, MUI_Setup, and MUI_Config) as well as several others developed by other addon authors that can be swapped out if the user chooses to do so. The core MUI addons contain most of the functionality that power the UI. These are also hosted on curseforge and can be updated via the . The user only needs to install the UI pack once following the instructions on the download page and should then rely on the Twitch client to automatically update each individual addon going forward. The UI supports all screen resolution types and is suitable for all types of gameplay.

A Brief History of MayronUI

MUI has gone through many major releases since its first release on WoWInterface on April 14th, 2011. These major releases are referred to as generations, or “Gens” for short, however, this naming convention may be coming to an end soon. The first release of MUI was simply called MayronUI. There were no core MUI addons as everything was controlled by KgPanel scripts. Then, on December 23rd, 2012, MayronUI Gen2 was born. This came with major UI artwork redesigns, an official MUI installer (now known as MUI_Setup), which injected addon settings into a “saved variable” to override default addon settings and to persist those changes between client restarts. The most notable change introduced in Gen2 was the removal of KgPanels from the UI pack.

As more major iterations were released, more addons written by other addon authors were replaced with MUI modules. All modules are contained and controlled by the MUI “engine” that powers the UI under the hood. Pkg-MayronDB and Pkg-MayronEvents are two powerful packages with low memory footprints that were developed using the MayronObjects framework. These were created as part of the MUI engine but were later refactored and extracted as packages for general use. MayronObjects provides the module framework for MUI while Pkg-MayronDB provides the embedded database and a concept called “update functions” to provide a streamlined approach for automatically updating the UI when the state of the database changes. Pkg-MayronEvents provides an event management system for creating, destroying, enabling, and disabling event handlers, and many other quality of life features.

In addition to these packages, a large chunk of code was extracted out of the MUI engine and bundled into another package for general use: Pkg-GridPanels. Pkg-GridPanels originated from the old LibMayronGUI library. This library is still being used in MUI to provide many utility functions to create widgets and menus, but the lighter package version, Pkg-GridPanels, has been designed for use in other addon projects. This version only provides the grid system that MayronUI uses to implement responsive UI panels (similar to how CSS-Grid and CSS-Flexbox works on the web).

Who is Mayron?

Mayron is the single developer behind MayronUI, Pkg-MayronDB, MayronObjects, Pkg-GridPanels, and Pkg-MayronEvents, and offers many Lua programming lessons hosted on his , as well as private tutoring. He also actively contributes to the WoW addon development community in anyway he can. On July 29th, 2018, Mayron created the where members discuss and help each other with addon development, Lua programming, MUI, and more. Eventually, two members known in the community as Monster and Monkey, were promoted as moderators to help with the large growth of new members. At the time of writing this (October 18th, 2020), the server currently has over 1,300 members roughly averaging between 150-250 active users online at any given time. Mayron also streams from time to time on .

The person behind the Mayron avatar

Hello, and thank you for reading up to this point! My real name is Mike Richards and Mayron is my main character’s name in WoW. I am a software developer/engineer living in the UK with a fulltime job in the industry whilst also finding the time to work on several personal side projects. I graduated from the University of Essex in 2016 with a first-class BSc in Computer Science and again in 2020 from the University of Manchester with a first-class MSc in Advanced Computer Science. I also studied an interactive media course before going to university, which allowed me to develop and express my artistic and graphic design skills. I would accept small internship positions to build websites for small businesses and later used these skills to build this website and, of course, MUI.

I have been playing the game since the release of The Burning Crusade expansion after seeing my brother play through the Vanilla experience. I would have started sooner but at that time of my life I was obsessed with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I started my WoW addon development journey with simple scripts I wrote for enhancing the interactivity of panels created using the popular KgPanels addon, which allows you to display visual frames on the screen. During this time, I didn't know anything about programming or what Lua was - I was still studying interactive media between 2011 and 2012 and slowly became obsessed with UI/UX and the WoW UI enthusiast community. In terms of the programming side of addon development, all I knew is that you could add “code snippets” to things called events that were somehow attached to frames I created in KgPanels, such as the OnLoad and OnClick events. I would constantly post questions on mmo-champion where a user by the name of Treeston (who sadly no longer exists) would help me from time to time with any questions I asked. I am forever grateful for his help and this inspired me to eventually give back to the community by one day feeling confiedent enough to share my own knowledge many years later. KgPanels was, and still is in my opinion, one of the best ways to get into addon development if you don’t know anything about programming, as it gives you access (albeit restrictive access) to parts of the WoW client-side API and you can later do more advanced things using Lua scripting when you naturally become curious to learn.

Thank you for following along with my story through addon development and the work that I put out to our wonderful community. It means a great deal to me everytime I see that same passion shine through other beginner programmers following a similar path as me through addon development. If you're not a programmer but love using my UI, or are following my other side projects and are a fan, thank you very much for your support.

Have a great day!
Mike Richards (a.k.a. Mayron)