wow directory structure
 

anyone know where i can find a list of the folders and files that are necessary for wow? trying to clean up the directory...
Like i have Blizzard Interface Art and Blizzard Interface Art (enUS) are they both needed?

There is a directory called WDB should that be there? Also both the Patches and Updates folders can be deleted right?

The Blizzard Art directory is from using the addon toolkit to extract the game art.

The WDB folder is where your cache files are stored. If deleted, WoW will simply remake them.

thats what i thought, is that the case for the Interface Data folders as well?

Everything in \World of Warcraft\Data I would leave alone. Every other folder that is needed should be re-created.

The files outside those folders you need pretty much everything save for patch files.

If after you delete stuff you can run the repair.exe tool. It will download any critical missing file.

so heres a question which im hunting else where for but maybe someone here already has it.... those files i got rid of that were the help files basically for building addons. How can i get those updated? In other words lol... 3.3 broke/changed the way some things work and i need to find out what the new code is like. More specifically... what happened to the LFG button. Im still showing a space on the Microbar for a button but it is no longer the LFGMicroButton frame.

You need the User Interface Customization tool, found here. That's what put the Blizzard Interface Art (realm) and Blizzard Interface Data (realm) folders in you WoW folder. Those are the files you need to look into.

i know but would they be up to date? i thought that when you got that thing from blizzerd it was an older version? Either way i found the answer in the blizz forums. The answer is... LFGMicroButton has been changed to LFDMicroButton.

Run it after every patch and it auto-updates itself. If you already have the folders extracted, it'll ask you if you want to overwrite them with the new (current) files.