Major Additions - Links and Downloads Manager

What this is and does

LDM is a general-purpose tool for managing libraries of links and files, and handling uploads and downloads in a flexible way, while tracking and control user access. It has a range of integrated media players and a large library of 'plugin' extras.

Installation and Usage Explained in the on-line Wiki, with a brief explanation in the file instructions.txt in the release zip.

Please use carefully and always backup your database before upgrading. Post reports of problems and suggestions for enhancements in this thread. You can also find extensive discussion of this mod in the VB3.7 mods section.

14.06.09 Version 2.3.0 is the the officially-supported version. Works with 3.7 and vb 3.8.

14.02.10 Post-1 version uploaded with minor bug fixes, including dealing with PHP 5.2.12


Staff Note: Sadly, Andrew D, the developer of the Links and Downloads Manager has passed away after a long period of illness.

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by Zookie

Just to see what would happen I changed line 22 hard-coding 2048 in place of the constant E_STRICT. After doing this AND turning off GZIP HTML the admin page loads though it is displayed on my normal forum template, not in the normal gray vBulletin Admin CP layout. It's odd seeing my site's theme in the right pane when using the Admin CP. Is that normal? Should I consider this the solution to the problem? I really don't know what difference the GZIP HTML option makes (we aren't talking about a large active forum here though I do expect to have some large file uploading and downloading taking place soon).

Interesting - and thanks. I don't get many reports from sites using IIS.

I can't recall why I added the E_STRICT test in that file - it's not used in any other file. So, either hard code the value or get rid of the sequence "& E_STRICT" altogether. You will not create problems. I realise that this created a need for php5, which is presumably why you had the problem.

Otherwise, LDM does not need php 5 - it is happy with the same versions of php/mysql as the rest of vb, as far as I know.

The gzip option tells vb to send info to the browser in a compressed form. This reduces bandwidth, but it has the nasty side effect of creating difficult-to-trace problems if something goes wrong.

What you are seeing on your vb admincp with the ldm admin pages is correct. Way back when LDM was first being written, it was not straightforward to integrate hacks into the admincp, so I decided to have an independent admin page, styled according to the rest of the board. Later on, it became possible to do the integration, but by that time I had written too much admin code to go back and redesign it.

[Zookie]

Originally Posted by nohuhu

AndrewD,

thanks for the firebug tip, i never knew such a great tool existed. i've been able to find the problem with button, it appears that there's a line containing relative path to the actual flash object in links_swfuploader_header_one template and somehow this line was set to "/forum/clientscript/swfupload/swfupload.swf". i adjusted it for my setup and flash object begun working but...

I had this EXACT same problem! I'm sure glad you posted this because there's no way I would have thought to look in the templates for hard-coded paths like that. I edited the links_swfuploader_header_one template hard-coding the path to the correct location in my site and now it works.

If I had used "forums" as my forum directory I would not have run into this. It's because I used a different directory name that I got bit by this bug. I suspect that most people just go with the default "forums" name for their forum directory. That's why there aren't a lot more reports of this bug.

[Zookie]

Thanks for all the help so far. I'm almost there but I have a bunch of questions still now that I've got it working. I'm using LDM only for uploading and downloading files. No links and no streaming data (music, videos, etc.). I don't want any mention of links on the site - just uploads and downloads.

1. How can I change the string in the Search menu from "Search Links/Downloads" to "Search Downloads"?
2. How can I change the "Add Entry" link on the Category page to "Upload a File"?
3. How can I change the bold, red "[Value Required]"string on the Add Entry page to non-bold, red "(required)"?
4. How can I change the "Name" label on the Add Entry page to "List Name"?
5. How can I change the "No file/url specified" error label to "No file specified"?
6. How can I remove the "Parent Categories" area on Add Entry page?
7. How can I remove the "Parent Forum" area on Add Entry page?
8. How can I remove the "Display Order" area on Add Entry page (or is this only displayed to admins)?
9. How can I remove the "Hide Entry" area on Add Entry page (or is this only displayed to admins)?
10. How can I remove the "If used, leave URL field blank" label on the Add Entry page?
11. On the Add Entry page, I don't want the "Submitted By" value to be editable. It should be the userID of the person adding the list. Is this only editable by an admin? If so, then it's no problem.

Now for the slightly bigger issue. I can't figure out where my uploads are being stored. I don't want them stored on the web site where they can be linked to directly so I set local_file_root set to "Yes" (it is displayed as set to "Server" in the Environment box), local_file_root_prefix set to "/LDM" and upload_dir set to "/Downloads". I believe I have LDM configured to create the directory though I can't find the setting now. I've uploaded two files and downloaded them from the site. Yet I can't find the directory that they are being stored in. From my settings I would think there would be a "LDM/Downloads" directory just below the wwwroot directory of my site (I'm on an IIS server and am not sure I'm using the right terminology here). The files must be getting saved somewhere but I can't figure out where.

The directory structure on the server and the location of the webs is thus:
c:\Websites\MySite.com\
The actual web site files are all located in the wwwroot directory on top of that path. So, my forum would be located at:
c:\Websites\MySite.com\wwwroot\forum\

The above structure being the case, I was expecting my uploaded files to be placed in the following directory:
c:\Websites\MySite.com\LDM\Downloads\
Where am I going wrong?

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by Zookie

Thanks for all the help so far. I'm almost there but I have a bunch of questions still now that I've got it working. I'm using LDM only for uploading and downloading files. No links and no streaming data (music, videos, etc.). I don't want any mention of links on the site - just uploads and downloads.

The following texts are set/changed using vbulletin phrases (vb/admincp/languages and phrases), as marked below:

1. How can I change the string in the Search menu from "Search Links/Downloads" to "Search Downloads"? phrase ldm_vbmenu_search
2. How can I change the "Add Entry" link on the Category page to "Upload a File"? ll_menu_addlink
3. How can I change the "Name" label on the Add Entry page to "List Name"? ll_name
4. How can I change the "No file/url specified" error label to "No file specified"? ll_error_urlnull
5. How can I remove the "If used, leave URL field blank" label on the Add Entry page? ll_uploadinfo

The master phrase file is provided in the /development/phrases subdirectory of the zip file - you can look through there to find the correspondence between other phrases and phrase names.

The following requires a template edit and a phrase edit:

1. How can I change the bold, red "[Value Required]"string on the Add Entry page to non-bold, red "(required)"?

a) Edit the template links_addentity and find the sequence:
<span class="highlight smallfont">[$vbphrase[ll_value_required]]</span>
Change to
($vbphrase[ll_value_required])
b) Edit the phrase ll_value_required

The following depend on LDM permissions (LDM/admin/permissions)

1. How can I remove the "Parent Categories" area on Add Entry page? can_select_category permission
2. How can I remove the "Parent Forum" area on Add Entry page? can_set_permissions
3. How can I remove the "Display Order" area on Add Entry page (or is this only displayed to admins)? can_set_display_order
4. How can I remove the "Hide Entry" area on Add Entry page (or is this only displayed to admins)? can_moderate_links
5. On the Add Entry page, I don't want the "Submitted By" value to be editable. It should be the userID of the person adding the list. Is this only editable by an admin? If so, then it's no problem. can_moderate_links

Originally Posted by Zookie

Now for the slightly bigger issue. I can't figure out where my uploads are being stored.

They should be stored in c:/LDM/Downloads with the settings you've given. If you want them in c:\Websites\MySite.com\LDM\Downloads\, you need to set local_file_root_prefix set to "Websites/MySite.com/LDM"

[Zookie]

Thanks Andrew! You Da Man!

Originally Posted by AndrewD

They should be stored in c:/LDM/Downloads with the settings you've given. If you want them in c:\Websites\MySite.com\LDM\Downloads\, you need to set local_file_root_prefix set to "Websites/MySite.com/LDM"

Hmmm... still not working. Looks like the only way I'm going to figure this out is if I can browse the server's file system to see where these folders and files are ending up.

• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "Websites/MySite.com/LDM" it accepts it but the directory isn't where it should be (can't find it).
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "Websites/MySite.com/wwwroot/LDM" it accepts it but the directory still can't be found.
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "/Websites/MySite.com/wwwroot/LDM" it accepts it and creates the directory where expected (on site). So it seems the leading forward-slash is needed.
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "/Websites/MySite.com/LDM" it complains that it can't write to that location.

My guess at this point is that I need the leading forward-slash but that I have a permissions issue. I'll talk with my hosting provider about what can be done on this.

Another odd thing I ran into. When I go to the Add an Entity page while signed in as an admin and click the "Uploadable filetypes and size limits" down-arrow below the Browse button it says my size limit is 2 Mbytes. If I do the same with a standard user account it say 47.68 Mbytes. Same file type in both instances. I set the attachment size for the file type to 50000000 in the vB CP. I don't know why it is displaying 2mb for an administrator and 47.68 mb for a regular user. Either way, if I select a file over 2mb the upload bar goes red and it says file too big. This may be due to the PHP max upload limit on my server. But I don't understand why an admin is getting a different max upload in the drop-down than a regular user. I can't find where in the permissions I might have screwed this up.

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by Zookie

Hmmm... still not working. Looks like the only way I'm going to figure this out is if I can browse the server's file system to see where these folders and files are ending up.

• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "Websites/MySite.com/LDM" it accepts it but the directory isn't where it should be (can't find it).
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "Websites/MySite.com/wwwroot/LDM" it accepts it but the directory still can't be found.
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "/Websites/MySite.com/wwwroot/LDM" it accepts it and creates the directory where expected (on site). So it seems the leading forward-slash is needed.
• If I set local_file_root_prefix to "/Websites/MySite.com/LDM" it complains that it can't write to that location.

My guess at this point is that I need the leading forward-slash but that I have a permissions issue. I'll talk with my hosting provider about what can be done on this.

I ran a test of a windows iis server. Without the leading slash, it seems that the directory is created in your forums directory, which is not what you want...

[Simon Lloyd]

Hi Andrew, sorry to post an inane question but i checked the wikki (maybe not well enough) but i couldn't find how to restore the My Ldm uploads / downloads to the public profiles, they were there before upgrade to 2.3.0 (im using 3.8.4) but not now?, everything else seems fine, the user profile fields are there so its odd.

Can you advise/help?

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Hi Andrew, sorry to post an inane question but i checked the wikki (maybe not well enough) but i couldn't find how to restore the My Ldm uploads / downloads to the public profiles, they were there before upgrade to 2.3.0 (im using 3.8.4) but not now?, everything else seems fine, the user profile fields are there so its odd.

Can you advise/help?

Not sure - I'm surprised that there is a problem - my test system with ldm 2.3.0 and vb 3.8.4 is showing the user profile fields fine.

Just to check the obvious - have you looked at the profile_ldmactivity setting on the LDM admin settings page.

Get back to me if this is not the problem - I imagine I will need access to your site.

[Simon Lloyd]

Thanks andrew its set to yes!, i'll pm you full access in the next few minutes and you can look at your leisure

[msnhockey]

Hi.. i have installed this product and the extra swfuploader

I am having trobles getting .swf videos to show. they upload no prob but when i view i get this

video not found
http://www.theufhl.com/forum/local_s...hp?action=stre

I also get white blank pages on only the mass edit pages also anyway to get an image from the video to show as a thumbnail

any help or tips is appriciated