To put it simply Mods are files that can change the way everything looks and works while your playing warcraft. Mods come as packages of files containing XML and LUA coding, these files once placed in the "interface/addons" directory of your World of Warcraft game will be read by the client and imposed over top of its own interface.
Mods are capable of doing many things from displaying new information to competely changing the look of your screen when you play wow. Be carefull when downloading mods however and I strongly suggest you never run any sort of .exe file that may come with a mod package unless you are 100% sure its legit (as in you got it directly from the developers site of a popular mod)
1.1 Where do I get Mods?
There are a number of sites that are specificly for world of warcraft mods out there are few of these are.
And of course you can always scoure the wow forums, theres always people on there trying to push their mods. If anyone finds another mod site not listed let me know Ill throw it up on the page.
1.2 Installing Mods
If World of Warcraft is running you should exit from the game before installing. Extract the main folder of the .zip file and then copy that folder to your World of Warcraft's Addons folder located inside the Interface folder.
Windows users:
The Addons folder can normally be found at C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons
Example: C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons\ModFolder
MacOS users:
The Addons folder can normally be found inside the Interface folder which is located inside the World of Warcraft application folder
The addon is now installed and you can now launch World of Warcraft.
1.3 Trouble Shooting
So now after you have your shiney new mod installed you will want to try it out, load up warcraft. You may get a message about your mod being out of date do you wish to load it anyway or cancel. All that means is you have an older version of the mod or perhaps the author never updated the mod, you may want to check if theres a newer version avalible or you can try to load the mod as is (which may or may not work). In the character selection screen youll notice an Addons button in the lower left hand corner of the screen, clicking this brings up a list of all the addons you have installed and a checkmark to allow you to disable / enable that addon for loading. Theres also a checkmark at the top of the list that says 'Load out of date Addons' which will ignore the fact that addons are not the correct version if you check it.
Once you get loaded up depending on what type of mod you installed you may see a big change or it may appear nothing has changed at all, if you dont see anything new at all that may just be the way the mod functions you may have to activate it by typing in a command such as /calendar or somthing to bring up the mod interface, if you dont know what to do read the user text that came with the mod (there usaully is one) if theres no readme file with your mod try checking the page where you downloaded it usaully if nowhere else theres information there on how to use the mod.
If when you load the mod everything looks completely out of wack or you see an error box with red text pop up that usaully means the mod is out of date and no longer functions properly. Unless your good at lua programing (in which case I dont know why you would be reading my article lol) youll have to find a newer version of the mod that works in order to use it.
1.4 Mods you should know about!
There are a few mods that are pretty core to world of warcraft, what I mean by that is a majority of people all use these same mods. You may have even heard of some of these from other people.
CT Mod is a fairly big mod that has all sorts of utility type functions for warcraft. It allows you to break up your interface and drag the parts all over the screen whever you like, display your buffs differently, show quest levels, it has a timer and much much more. Some people are still stuck on using Cosmos but in my opinion CT Mod gone above and beyond Cosmos in many ways.
CT Raid is one of the most popular mods out there for raiding guild, in fact I would eventully like to get everyone in guild using this mod as it is so usefull. To use it you must also be using CT Mod as its an extension. It allows you to fully customize how information is displayed, alerts you when people are debuffed by changing the colors of their bars, show alerts when people become to low on life and has advanced targeting features as well as a raid message system to help raid leaders communicate to you.
Titan Panel is a useful addon that displays a bar on the top or bottom of your screen giving you all sorts of information about the game as you play from where you are, how much ammo you have, your experiance, pvp rank ect..
