Integration with vBulletin - vHoist : Garage / Car Showroom

About:

vHoist is a new Virtual Garage plugin that allows your users to share the rides with the rest of your forum!

Our plugin fully integrates into your forum software providing seamless integration without the limits of other plugins with similar features, such as extra SQL querys added to your site.


vHoist Has:

- Multiple Garages for each user

- No Added SQL Query's

- Users Cars listed under their post info

- Full seamless integration into your forum

- Users can share their garages over multiple websites without the need to modify their profiles for each site.

- Anyone that "parks" their car on your website, will provide a backlink to your site for every other site they are on.

- Unlimited Pictures and Rides

- Many new features coming weekly! Facebook plugin, phpbb plugin both in development.

- Will be supporting MOTORCYCLES, ATV's, Boats and much much more!

Sites that are already using vHoist.com:

http://www.GenerationDub.com
http://psaclub.net/forums.php

Install Instructions

1) Download the zip file.

2) Upload vHoist.php into the root directory of your website.

3) Install the product "product_vhoist.xml" (Allow overwrite if you're upgrading) into vBulletin.
[ Plugins & Products ] -> [ Manage Products ] -> Add/Import Product.

4) Visit www.vHoist.com and Register an account. *COMPLETELY FREE*

5) Once logged in, click "Downloads", and redownload the zip file to enable the administration panel. REFRESH this page after download.

6) Add your website to vHoist.com by using the "Site Adminstrator" menu to the left, located under your Member Garage.
* Your site will not be added to vHoist.com until you upload vHoist.php and correctly add your URL to our database.

7) Save the information and Paste the passkey Generated by vHoist.com into your vBulletin vHoist settings.

[ vBulletin Options ] -> [ vBulletin Options ] -> [ vHoist Settings ] -> Website Passkey

8) Adjust your settings in vBulletin for vHoist accordingly.

After you are finished the above, visit your newly installed vHoist on your website. You will see a message saying that you do not currently have any cars parked on your site. Click on "Add / Edit vHoist" and then park your car on your site!

FAQ:

How does the benefit my site?

- There is no "Overhead" added to your site like other plugins, such as vbGarage, because everything takes place on vHoist.com

- Backlinks, an important SEO feature, come from vHoist.com to your site. For example, if one member parks his / her car on multiple websites, you will automatically be back linked from potentially thousands of sites. It's already happening.. http://forums.generationdub.com/vHoi...iew&gid=100390 - This is a VERY important feature and benefit to your site.

- Your users now only have to "Update" their ride on one site, and it propogates to all other sites they have parked too. Now if they have "forgotten" that they came to forum before but parked their ride there, it will be bumped up to the top of the list when they have an update.

- If someone comments from your forum, the user will receive an email saying that someone commented from your forum, and potentially giving you another user to come back to your site! Again, ANOTHER backlink is added on the comment. Here is an example:

http://forums.generationdub.com/vHoi...iew&gid=100000

Here's what a users garage looks like parked on 2 seperate sites!

Site 1 - http://forums.generationdub.com/vHoi...iew&gid=100000

Site 2 - http://psaclub.net/vHoist.php?do=view&gid=100000

Do you get our users information?

We save the UserID, UserName and Email address of users that "Park" a car on your website, so that the user display information will properly show up on your site. This is strictly because users will occasionally have multiple usernames across many forums. Since vHoist.com allows a user to "park" their ride on your site, we need to display their username for your site properly.


For more FAQ's like this, visit: http://www.vhoist.com/FAQ.aspx

Time to install: < 5 Minutes
Template Edits: 0
File Uploads: 1
Products: 1

Has been tested on:

3.6.7
3.6.8
3.7.1
3.8.0

Believed to work on ALL versions from 3.6.0 to 3.8.0, but would like confirmation from users currently using those sites.

product / vhoist.php files - [1.0.0.1]
- Fixed Search not working
- Removed Sponsor Program
- Allowed importing for 3.5.7
- Disabled "member ride" listed under user's name until I can figure out the "slow down" issue
- problem with quotes in user names
- moved related rides to the left instead of right

product / vhoist.php files - [1.0.0.2]
- Added "Random Image" table - show 1 through 10 random garages by your users
- Created a new way to add vHoist to your forum, so you can use a selection box to pick where it goes
- Added "Latest Image" table - show 1 through 10 last edited garages by your users
- Added more extensive options menu
- Added Quick Links Menu
- Fixed "Enable / Disable" Option
- Removed "Members Rides" option under user names until futher testing

product / vhoist.php files - [1.0.0.3]
- Added sorting on title bar of search
- Added some vHoist website functionality
- View users rides from www.vhoist.com/ride/XXXXXX/ where XXX is the ride number.
- Fixed bug for not being able to remove ride

product / vhoist.php files - [1.0.0.4]
- Added User Profiles tab
- Removed this from "beta" since it's been functioning on sites for a few months now
- Added some vHoist website functionality - analytics to be added in next release
- View users profile from www.vhoist.com/id/username/ where XXX is the username on vHoist.com

Known Issues for this release:

- None reported

Other:

This is currently a working public BETA. I will be supporting this daily (well, mostly nightly EST) in this thread and via any problems submitted by email using the contact form on the site, http://www.vhoist.com


*Attention vbGarage Users*

We have been working diligantly on a conversion tool to transfer your current vBGarage users into vHoist.com. The converter is currently in Alpha testing and is not publicly avalible yet.

It is recommend that smaller sites that are using vBGarage start off with a fresh new vHoist account, however, we understand that content is hard to come by and we are working fast to bring this converter to you! If this is stopping you from installing vHoist.com, then please use our contact forum to let us know you are waiting!

....

Cheers .... and .... here goes nothing... this is my first publicly released mod, so if I did this wrong, please forgive me!

[footose]

admin ( at ) vhoist (dot) com

or

harry ( at ) generationdub (dot) com

These will both go straight to my blackberry.

...

I'd like to start off by apologizing for the downtime we had yesterday. I'm just dropping by all vHoist sites today to make sure everything is working. All administrators will receive an email from me later today regarding the situation.

For the technically minded:

One of our DNS servers failed early morning Monday and caused us to get a new server. Unfortunately this had the adverse side effect of changing our DNS IP Address and "parking" our Domain name. I immediately changed the DNS, but as some of you are aware, it can take up to 48 hrs to propagate across the entire internet, which caused you to see the errors that you have been seeing. Yes, a nightmare for me. Our entire vHoist site was down only for a matter of 30 minutes, however, because of the 24 to 48 (sometimes even 72) hour delay on DNS Propagation it has really affected us for the last 2 days.

For everyone else:

One of our computers died and there may still be a few issues lingering from yesterday. If you can visit vHoist.com from your home PC, but can't see your car parked on your favorite forum, its because your forum's computer hasn't got the "house warming" invitation yet and probably won't know our new address until the end of the day! Hopefully everyone has our new address by the end of the day and we can all have a nice BBQ together poolside

...

This was completely unexpected, and *knock on wood* has been solved permanently.

As I said in the past, vHoist is a free plugin and thus does not generate any income, but I try to fully support it as any other company would a paid product. Since I'm a "one man show" - some items take a little longer than usual.

This is our first (and hopefully last) downtime since our release date of January 1st, 2009, making us have a 99.4% uptime which I consider fairly decent. vHoist itself was technically not even down, but our DNS provider was.

I will be releasing a new vHoist update soon that will include a "check" for activity so that the plugin does NOT mess up your site when our site is down. This is something I have been working on for a while.

ALSO, on the good news side of things, I will be releasing the following in the next 2 weeks:

- Auto Registration for users coming from forums
- "Templates" for different types of vehicles (ATV's, Cars, Trucks, Bikes..)
ie: A bike does not have "interior" mods, thus does not need the car template
- Adding Boats and Bicycles
- Checking for vHoist connectivity (so your site doesn't get error messages)
- PHPBB Plugin
- Facebook addon

Please stay updated via This Thread or of course.. on http://www.vHoist.com

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience and hopefully this has not tainted anyone's opinion of vHoist as we have never had this happen to us before.

Harry Scanlan
http://www.vHoist.com

[footose]

Did you get hacked? Is there a security issue here? Why would it affect my index.php page?

If I enable to plug in, my main forum page spits out the error below:

We were not hacked.

The reason it effects your main page is that the plugin downloads a piece of information from our site and relays it onto your site. I didn't anticipate this kind of downtime in the plugin and thus did not put in an "error check" - which is why you were getting the error.

Please see my above post outlining the issue. You should be able to reactivate your account as early as now. I will be checking EVERY vHoist site today and sending personal emails to the administrators (via the address that has been provided in our database by you) to make sure everything is running properly.

[footose]

3.7.2 working fine....BUT when sharing it with another site, when a car is edited then saved it places a duplicate of that car.

Also the forum setion it creates where can the name be edited ??

Next release you will beable to edit all of these options, including languages!!

Can you send me an example of the "duplicate car" ?

[kNeeLy]

was down yesterday....all good today....thanks man!!

[daxxer]

I noticed on your site that Harley-Davidson wasn't represented for motorcycles in your drop down. I'm thinking of using your plug in at http://www.HDRidersUSA.com but don't want to spend hours figuring how to change it from cars to bikes. Any ideas on this

[357Magnum]

any news on the next release? still would like the ability as an admin to disable certain people rides or them in general from showing up on my site. i.e. dont want cars on my MC forum

[kNeeLy]

Originally Posted by 357Magnum

any news on the next release? still would like the ability as an admin to disable certain people rides or them in general from showing up on my site. i.e. dont want cars on my MC forum

i would LOVE to be able to delete members rides off my list...can this be done ?

[kNeeLy]

bump:

Footose...can we/you delete members rides off our lists if there not active on our sites anymore?

[kNeeLy]

bump... sorry....i really wanna get a car off my list...lol...

[footose]

We recently added Mountain Bikes / Bikes to vHoist.

Footose...can we/you delete members rides off our lists if there not active on our sites anymore?

Sorry about the slow response!

I will release an update that will allow you to do this. If you send me your site name and the cars you want removed I will do it manually for now.