Some of my projects start with something small that I want to change while playing World of Warcraft. It might be the way a health bar is drawn, or a setting I do not want to keep switching back on.
Custom addons give those adjustments a home. Two examples from my own setup are DelHealthOrientation, an extension for ElvUI, and WoW Phone Chat Log, a small helper for a separate chat companion project.
May 2026: health bars that stay put
DelHealthOrientation has a narrow job: keep the player health bar vertical and the target health bar horizontal. ElvUI provides the unit frames. My custom addon changes the orientation behavior of those existing frames.
The implementation checks that each frame and its health bar exist before touching them. It saves the original orientation method, then wraps it so subsequent calls keep the chosen direction. A marker on the health bar prevents the addon from wrapping the same method repeatedly.
The two choices are explicit in the source: ElvUF_Player gets VERTICAL, and ElvUF_Target gets HORIZONTAL.
Getting the timing right
Applying the setting once is only part of the job. The addon listens for entering the world, changing targets, and addons loading. After each event, it schedules the adjustment at three short delays: 0.1, 0.5, and 1 second.
Those retries give the interface time to create or update its frames. The missing-frame check makes an early attempt harmless, and the saved-method marker keeps later attempts from stacking another wrapper.
It is also an implementation with clear limits. It depends on ElvUI’s frame names and methods, and another extension can change the same behavior. The surviving source shows how I approached that setup; it is not a compatibility claim for every current WoW or ElvUI version.
September 2026: a small chat helper
WoW Phone Chat Log is even smaller. It listens for PLAYER_LOGIN and enables the game’s built-in chat logging. It also registers /wplog as a manual way to turn logging back on.
The addon’s part ends there. A separate companion service reads the log for a phone-friendly view. That separation matters: the addon handles the in-game setting, while the companion handles reading and displaying the output.
There is no need for the addon to recreate a chat interface or maintain another copy of every message. For the journal, I am describing the workflow without publishing chat records or a link to the private companion.
Why the small projects count
These addons are focused changes to an existing environment. The work is in choosing the right event, checking whether the object is ready, and making repeated updates behave predictably.
They also show the difference between configuring a third-party addon and writing custom behavior around it. ElvUI is someone else’s project; DelHealthOrientation is the small extension I made for my own layout.
There is a related experiment in VoicePersona, which turns speech into character chat. That one runs outside the game. Together, these projects reflect my interest in making everyday interactions fit the way I want to use them.