Hiya! It's the Cosmos team here, and we'd like to thank you for using our cool stuff! No, really, we do want to thank you - we don't do this solely for ourselves, y'know.
However, all that said, we want to fill in some blanks that you may or may not know already.
Well, starting of with the hard parts, eh? Cosmos is, essentially, a load of addons (sort of like plug-ins) for the World of Warcraft game.
Cosmos is not just a bundle of addons, thrown together by some person with too much time. No, we have so much time, we code our own.And snatch others and incorporate theirs.
The main thing is that we try to make sure our addons behave well with one another, and with other people's addons, too. In fact, we'd like people to use our addons more!
Cosmos comes with a patcher program called Cosmos.exe, which is placed in your World of Warcraft folder. Its use is optional, if you are afraid of executing programs downloaded from the Internet, you don't have to use it. However, it makes it much easier for you to get regular updates for Cosmos.
The patcher is there to make life easier for you, the common user. Unfortunately, the patcher does not get regular attention from a developer anymore, and so on. This means that the patcher can be a bit wonky.
The patcher may require great care in feeding and handling it (if you use more addons than Cosmos-y ones), or it may whack any addons it doesn't recognize. Needless to say, those addons are often added by you, the user, so this is probably a Bad Thing. Our solution is for you to put a file named ".nopatch" in the AddOn folders that you wish to manage yourself. Once you have done this, the patcher will gladly - even gaily - ignore that addon folder forever.
We also recommend that you - in case of error or strange stuff - use the Keep Files Clean option. This will terminate all addons that the patcher doesn't recognize (to remove old ones).
Managing your addons yourself? Wanting to build your own cool UI distro? That's fine with us! Check out our distributions here:
Note that this is slightly more advanced than using the patcher, but will probably cause less problems if you like to "mix'n'match" your addons.