Suggestions for the next version of VBgarage
 

Here's my wishlist for vbGarage :

- the ability to rate entries
- the ability to use the editor to leave comments
- a 'Garage of the month' award system
- the ability to place entries into categories (e.g Nissans, Saabs etc.) Each upload of a garage has to have a category selected.
- the categories would then be shown on the main page. The plus point of this is that garages are more organized.

more to come. :)

What I think is most needed is:

Linked pictures

This emphasises that you only give a link of a picture in the internet and then it shows up as a picture from your space. There are million of free and paid image hosting servies there outside , do people could load tons of picture on this and then just link them on your site so that you don't have to pay for traffic!

what about -
Admin editable fields on the form so you could easily add required sections like year, model, engine, color, mods, VIN, etc. This would make the garage info consistant.

Ideally, you would be able to sort the garage page by year, VIN, model, etc.

only request I have is a random pic of the users car next to their username. Lets say a garage has thousands of entrys, your gonna want to view the cars that look nice, not all that stock, and appeal to you more. Having 1 pic next to their username on the far left would allow of quickviewing of the car so they won't have to actually click on the garage :)

Thanks for the ideas folks.

Categorys will remain user garage based for now.

Comments will probably remain a text input box.

Random photos will be displayed in the users garage. For random photos in other places, that will have to be a hack/add in. We feel that those functions add too much overhead. The random photos for forumhome hack is a good place to find code to do this.

Custom fields require another database table and queries and conditionals. I doubt I'll do it.

Hotlinking to photos does not seem to work at all. I doubt we'll be trying to get it working, in fact we don't consider it broke, it's a security feature instead.

We have not even looked at a rating system.

We did add the WYSIWYG editor to the garage setup though!

i think this hack is great.

instead of 1 big field, i think having

make
model
year
ect. ect.

fields would be better..
anythoughts?

have a section under the users avatar of there car, model etc. and a link to there garage.

A sort feature would be awesome, many members of my staff do not like how it auto-sorts by activity. They wish they some other ways to sort the vbgarage.

A textbox that has a set characterlimit (30 or so) for a quick description of each uploaded image. I know it'd throw the organization off on the right, but it would be nice if people had to say added things about each image rather than having to do so on the left. Many rather click images than read text, hehe.

Awesome hack..my users are definitely taking advantage of it. :)

We just rolled over 25 people and I noticed the second page starts count at 1 again rather than 26. Not sure if this is a concern to anyone...but it'd be nice if it could keep the total running rather than restarting count each page.

why not just use vb's built in custom profile fields for the basics, like car/year/make/model all the simple stuff?

that way the member only has to enter it once, and you can use the same info for vb timeslips and have that info next to their name on the postbit as well?

BTW if you havn't guessed, this is what i'm working on...

Wanted to add one more thing...

Users are uploading files that are larger than 1mb, so when you do look at the garage the popup window with the image will not fit on screen. Many users are complaining about this...yet they are the ones uploading the pictures. These digital cameras nowadays are doing this...