OK

yes

oh, but i already have my thumbs in the database... and with the xml i pointed to the linkimg, should i do the same to the linkimgthumb?

I see created thumbs are linked in there... and will this change when i revalidate links... Oo

Thanks ^^

Hi Andrew! Many thanks for the excellent job you've done, both as a programmer and through your support of this amazingly extensive script.

I've searched this thread umpteen times with different keywords over the past couple of days, but can't seem to find any solution to the following question (my apologies if it's already been asked several times already):

How do I put the XX most recently added entries on forumhome and/or forumdisplay?

- I already added the forumhome patch, but that just adds stats as far as I can see;

- I don't have vbadvanced and don't really wanna use it;

- I experimented in using local_links_external as an RSS feed but it never showed up.

I'd like to use this script as a link directory, but I really really need the functionality to promote the most recent listings on forumhome. Ideally I could put it in forumdisplay too, but I'll take forumhome by itself if that's all that'll work!

Thanks in advance. :)

I'm not sure that I'm understanding you.

linkimg should point to the original image. linkimgthumb should either be blank or point to the required thumbnail. If linkimgthumb is blank, LDM creates a new thumbnail 'on the fly'. If *thumbs_dir* is set, it then tries to save this in the specified *thumbs_dir* directory, and, if successful, updates linkimgthumb.

So, during your import process, you can do the following:
a) set linkimg correctly and leave linkimgthumb blank and let LDM do the work, or
b) set linkimg and linkimgthumb correctly

LDM attempts to recreate a thumbnail in these situations:
a) During 'Add Entry/Edit Entry'
b) During page display
and
c) During admin/rebuild thumbs

Yes, the current forumhome patch only gives statistics. It is not difficult to provide another plugin to produce the most recent entries. How do you want this to look? Whereabouts on the page, what content, etc.

Wow, thank you! Well, my setup is a two-column site, and I hope to put the list in the sidebar. To get an idea of what I mean, maybe check out the "current topics" section of the lefthand sidebar over on my test site. (It's still very much in progress, so pardon the messy appearance.) I'd love to include a section for "Newest Links" that's auto-populated.

I guess to keep it flexible so that others besides me would find such a plugin useful, maybe the best format would be a straightforward table, looking much like a vbadvanced block. Or even better, an unordered list? They're so easily styled through css, if one chooses.

As far as content goes... I guess just listing the link/resource title, date of addition (optional?) and submitter (optional?) would be useful. Some might like the option of a brief description, but that's probably too messy.

Most important would be a list in reverse chron order, but if it's at all possible, "what's popular" and/or "highest rated" lists would be terrific additions.

(I'm really surprised no one else has asked for this yet! Do most people use the vbadvanced modules?)

Thanks so much for considering this, Andrew. You're really tops in my book. I've never seen a coder who's so incredibly diligent at supporting a free mod!

Err .. do you mean like the following ..

http://www.yaxleyvillage.com/local_links.php

This is possible by just wrapping LDM within vBa .. If you have a look in the manual for vBa it tells you how to do it .. (and you can have as many modules as you like on the page, as well as choosing if you want a 2 or 3 column layout)

:)

Oh, ok, here is what i did, i set linkimg, in this case it's my thumb, then set linkimgthumb to 0.

Now image is showing, that's why i wanted a small thumb and a medium image to be shown in linkbit template.

Well, no thumbs directory set, everything seem to work... so far :p

Hits are recorded, i figured out how ratings worked and they are already in there... but i can't see stats in my main page? oO

Welcome back :)

[high]* Slave waves :)[/high]

Hi Andrew,

Once again thank you for all the time you have put into this hack and thank you for adding in the avatar to the linkbit. It looks great now.

Just a couple of questions I'm hoping you could help me with...

I am using the create new thread plugin and was wondering if there is any way that a link to the thread created could also be included in the linkbit. (hope that makes sense).

And also, since we can use bbcode and smilies in the description field, is there any way that the standard controls could also be added to the "add a link" template? Most of my members don't know the bbcode offhand and use the controls when they need to add something in.

Thanks again for this. It's just great.

Clancy

There's a small problem of timing with this - the autothread create needs to know the linkid of the new entry, so the plugin is triggered after the contents of the linkbit have already been stored in the database. We can work round this, at the cost of another database access, but it should be possible. Bear in mind that these actions are 'once and for all' - if someone subsequently deletes an entry in LDM, the autothread is not removed - so too if we provide a connection in the linkbit to the thread, that connection will 'break' if the thread gets deleted.

I'll take a look - this is a good idea which I had never got round to.

Your support is incredible Andrew. Do you ever sleep? :)

Yeah I see what you mean. I guess this could be avoided by not allowing members to delete the links or threads created, but I guess they could always edit the link and that would cause a break. Is there any way to prevent users from editing their links altogether? If not, that's ok. I could live with the odd break here and there. I don't think it would be a major problem.

I would just use the comment system if it was set up with the standard controls and if it had the same "auto-notification" sent if a new post "comment" was added to all users subscribed to a thread (link)... but that would make it more like a forum and I'm not sure if that makes sense to do especially since the auto-create thread is already a plugin and works really well.

That would be so great.

Thanks again for all your help and time.

Clancy

Kira, try these for size. You need to import the xml plugin, then patch the forumhome template to display $links['new'] and $links['hot'] - these each contain tables without the top and bottom table tags. The attached forumhome.txt shows one way to do this, and the attached links_vbalinks.txt gives a modified template for the individual table rows which adds the link description to the name/number of hits.

You're amazing, AndrewD. I'll give it a try and report back.

Thank you so much!

hey kira, could you post some ss too please? :D

Hey Andrew, I tried it out -- works perfectly! :) I tweaked the code to use an unordered list (just so it matches the rest of my sidebar). Easy peasy. Thanks a million!

I just noticed that for some reason the hit counter isn't working on either this "top list" addon or the regular directory listings pages. Can you think of what might cause such a problem?

Sure thing! My setup is very different as I've moved all the "what's going on" stuff to a sidebar. So you can get a better picture of what this would look like on a standard setup, I re-added the what's going on section and took a screenshot. (See #1.)

The second screenshot shows my CSS-ized sidebar version without the description or hits.

seems to be working to me - I visited your New York Times link, used it to visit the NYT then Nature, the hit countersd went up by one and the 'Most Popular Links' box appeared on your front page with these two entries in it.

Oh, whoops, I didn't realize visits from admins apparently don't get counted. When I log out, or if I login as a member test account, the hits do indeed increase. Yay! :)

Admin visits do get counted, unless you've given this group 'can_bypass_hit_recording' permission on the LDM admin/permissions page

Anyway, glad to hear that all is well.

cool setup kira, I like how you changed it.

speaking of, andrew you should get some ss from a few of the people with nice looking boards to add to the hack information. It might help some people realize what its all about and how powerful it is.

definitely useful!! that would be great if you could throw that in the next versoin. :) :D

I'm still getting this problem. :(

other users have complained about it too. For me, seems to happen most often with MP3s. But sometimes happens with other files too. movin the file around on my harddrive before uploading didn't do anything.

http://www.clantsu.org/forums/local_links.php
to test it if you want.

I'll give ya admin (pm-ing you now)

Oh, my, this is becoming the most versatile mod for vB... thanks Andrew.

i second that i dont know how come it wasnt hack of the month :surprised:

Maybe it had a slow start... maybe for vB 3.6! ^^

But no beta, please! XD

Unfortunately, there will have to be a beta for VB36. There are some sigificant changes in the 'plumbing' of VBulletin itself, and we will need to check that everything is working correctly.

what do you mean "becoming"?

;) this IS the most versative mod for vb. :)

How nice to have friends and allies...

hi AndrewD,
Do u have any idea to integrate LDM with vBux ? User can downlaod by paying points (points that earned by posting) ?

And Mass file importer from the ftp ?

it would be really nice for all of us .

Thnx.

AndrewD,

Wow, great mod, and thanks for sharing! :up:

With regards to post #1942, will you be implementing a 301 redirect? I think this would be best for SEO purposes.

Thanks for the hint - I was wondering how best to deal with this suggestion

Yes, that is what I mean. Now I need to get rid of the vB navbar and make LDM smaller (less wide) to fit in there.

andrewd,

thanks for the update on this...i see you fixed a few of my problems! not that they were mine alone but i want to thank you for the extensive time you have put into this. every time i update this manager only gets better.

i will let you know (of course) if i have problems with this update but so far its been perfect. even created the thread by itself...couldn't believe it...i have been gone so maybe it was fixed all ready but this is great!!

Firstr beta withdrawn - second beta in main post to this thread.

I've sat on this for a while, but think it needs a bit of testing. I believe that it works correctly with VB35 and VB36 and that VB35 installations will survive the upgrade to VB36. To improve performance, I've split up the main code into new files, so possibly there will be broken command links.

What's new?

Handles VB3.5 and 3.6
Extras
- patch-forumhome-newlinks sets up list of new/hot links for forumhome
- two versions of lightbox addin, a simpler/more reliable and a fancier version
Moderation
- Can be enabled/disabled per category
WYSIWYG editor
- Available for add/edit/rate entry
Sorting
- By submitting user
User profile integration
- Lists user's latest entries as well as latest hits

Bugs fixed
- Attempts to access entries that have moved to another category trigger an HTTP 301 redirect
- Edits no longer trigger "new entry" message on category if latest date becomes earlier than user's last visit
- id3-handle plugins no longer kill LDM if getid3 subdirectory uploaded incorrectly
- Keywords can contain quotes
- Realmedia jukebox filetypes modified to avoid starting with characters 'rm '
- XHTML corrected in admin/settings pages

I would appreciate some testing from brave users who remember to back up their databases....

Hi Andrew :)

Can I suggest you create a new thread for the 3.6 version in the 3.6 hacks area and then put a freeze on 3.5 development (like you did with the 3.0 thread) .. Once 3.6 goes gold mind you ;)

Once it goes gold....

So far, I've only caught one area where we needed parallel versions of code, which was to handle the profilefields integration

awesome!

does this version help deal with the BLANK SCREEN upload problem some of are getting?

anyword on that btw?

I thought I had dealt with this - the other person reporting the problem had not installed the software correctly (partly my fault, because the code didn't pick up the mistake). The new version has some extra error checking built in for two situations where I could foresee problems. But it is possible that there are other problems at your site.

Oo you added more phrases to this version?

Need some spanish customisations? ^^

u.u don't know if i'm that brave... i'd love to wait till 3.6 is gold.