Major Additions - DTO Garage - free garage features for all your members (vB 3.8.X)

Drive Thru Online ? Garage

Overview

DTO Garage is a free product allowing all members of a site to show off their car, truck, motorcycle or other powersports toy. Site owners can easily adapt the section and subsection titles to suit the attributes to the site's focus. Images are stored locally preventing broken links and over limit displays common with images linked offsite. Drive Thru Online has made upgrading to the paid version of DTO Garage Plus easy, all user data stored in DTO Garage is retained for a seamless transition.

For users, management of their vBulletin garage is conveniently handled through their user control panel. The intuitive user interface encourages even the most challenged to create a compelling Garage. Images are added via a wizard from either the users own computer or a specified URL. Thumbnails are dynamically created with high-resolution images displayed in a navigable Lytebox. Users can designate whether a garage is visible to the rest of the site members or hidden until they have time to polish the information and give it the debut it deserves. Other users can view garages using interactive pop-up menus embedded in each post or through the Garage owner's profile.

Key Features

• vBulletin Options-based customization of information collected and presented in garages
• User management of garages via User Control Panel
• Simple-to-use image uploads per garage
• Lytebox presentation of high resolution garage images
• bbCode supported in information areas
• Additional image placement in information area supported
• Dynamic presentation of garages in postbit and user profile
• Embedded full featured searchable and indexed Help
• Fully documented
• Fully supported

Language Translation
As of version 1.1.3 DTO Garage has not been fully phrased and only supports English. With a future release it is our intent to offer a fully phrased version to support language translation of the product. When the fully phrased version is available we will provide documentation and tools to speed translations of the product for use on your site. We will also encourage those who have performed a translation to contribute it for distribution to other members. Any contributed languages will be included with this thread and credit given to the author. Site owners are free to translate the product either in its current state or future releases as they see fit given that the note found in the following Upgrade section is followed when upgrading. While Drive Thru Online will provide information to translators regarding the context of wording we can not provide support to facilitate the actual translation itself.

Compatibility

• Fully compatible with vBulletin 3.6.8 through vBulletin 3.8.x
• PHP 5.X or later (compiled with GD support) and MySQL 5.X or later is required.

Upgrading from a previous version of DTO Garage

1. Prior to installation/upgrade we recommend that you perform a back up of your site's database and files.
2. After unzipping the attached package open readme.html in your browser.
3. Click on the ?Documentation & installation instructions? to view the complete documentation for Garage.
4. Note: If you have customized the DTO Garage templates in a previous release it is recommended that you make a copy of your changes, revert to the version of templates included with the new release and migrate your changes into the new version's templates. Failure to do this may cause the product to operate improperly and/or support new features that may have been added to the product.
5. If you use a custom style for your site you may have to modify the garage templates. For more information refer to this how-to written to address the most common modifications required.

Installation & Configuration for vB 3.6.x through vb 3.8.x

1. Prior to installation/upgrade we recommend that you perform a back up of your site's database and files.
2. After unzipping the attached package open readme.html in your browser.
3. Click on the ?Documentation & installation instructions? to view the complete documentation for Garage.
   
   Alternatively, you can also access documentation by visiting our web site under the Support tab.

Copyright & Licensing

• DTO Garage is copyright protected by Drive Thru Online, Inc.
• You are free to download and install this plugin on any vBulletin forum for which you hold a valid vB license.
• Unauthorized distribution of any code and/or documentation, whole or in part, included here is strictly prohibited.
• In addition, the supplied copyright notice must be maintained.

Other Drive Thru Online Products

• DTO Garage and Garage Plus vBadvanced Modules ? free vBadvanced modules for Garage and Garage Plus
• DTO Garage Plus ? paid version with vBSEO sitemap generator add-ons, usergroup permissions, and advanced search features. Click here for a comparison of Garage and Garage Plus.
• DTO Clubs, ShowCase, and Vendor Tools - paid products designed to grow your membership and create revenue from your site

Support

We will provide support in this thread on an as-needed basis to members that have marked this modification as Installed. Additional support resources can be found on our site under the Support tab.

Release and Version History
1.1.3 - October 7, 2009
New feature and bug fix release

New Features

• Changed orientation of images in garage display from vertical to horizontal orientation for cleaner display.
• Modified index page to provide paged display of most recently added garages.
• Added error handling for upload of unsupported image formats when adding a picture to a garage.

Fixes

• Added caching of garage-related templates for use in private message postbit display.

1.1.2 - August 21, 2009
New feature and bug fix release

Note: This release did not include updated documentation to reflect the new features below. As this is an interim release we will be updating documentation with the next 1.2.0 release of Garage and Garage Plus.

New Features

• Garage index page - index page accessible from breadcrumb when viewing a members garage. Displays a random selection of up to 25 member garages.
• Navbar menu - Added "My Garage" link when user is logged in
• Navbar menu - Added "Garages" to take user to garage index page
• With a garage index page member garages are no longer display in a new browser window (the only exception is if you preview your own garage when managing it).

Fixes

• Users currently not logged in are prevented from managing or adding a garage.
• When using quick reply the Garage link is shown in the user's postbit given that the user has a visible garage configured.

1.1.1 - July 6, 2009
Fix release

• Correct alignment of Garage/Garage Plus navbar pop-up menu.
• SQL error when rendering Garage postbit links for guest users - no longer attempts to render a link for Guest users.
• Corrected issue for sites using database table prefixes where a SQL error was generated when attempting to insert an image into a garage.

1.1.0 - June 19, 2009
Initial release

[mferguson]

I looked at our code and the only time that this might occur is if , somehow, the userid for the garage owner is lost. I'm not sure if this would be lost in the database record for the garage or something else. I tried to visit the URL of the garage referenced in the error but receive a "The service is unavailable." message. If you would like to contact me via PM with information on how to access the garage I can try to reproduce the problem.

Thanks!

Mark

[Hostboard]

The server is up and domain is working. I only get "The Service is Unavailable" message when visiting that specific URL.

Here is a link to my personal garage:
http://www.monstermayhem.org/forums/...ehicle_id=1000

[mferguson]

I just noticed that the URL provided was bad. I changed this to:

PHP Code:

http://www.monstermayhem.org/forums/dto_garage.php?do=viewvehicle&vehicle_id=1000 


and was able to view the garage with no issue.

With the above in mind where did you copy the original URL from? Perhaps the issue with the original error was because of a bad URL format emitted by our code.

Thanks!

Mark

[Hostboard]

The text was copied and pasted directly from the email I got when the erorr was generated.

[mferguson]

Very strange. Have you seen any other errors similar to this before? It looks like you have a good number of garages already in place.

At the minimum there doesn't appear to be any data integrity issues with the garage itself. For some reason a query was executed trying to determine what to put in the header relative to the garage owner's avatar and it couldn't retrieve that information for some reason.

If you are open to the idea of monitoring to see if this happens again perhaps we can find the pattern and identify what may be causing the retrieval of the avatar to fail. Hopefully we'll see a similar error occur but on a different garage.

Best regards,

Mark

[Hostboard]

The site was recently moved and we lost avatars somewhere along with some other minor annoyances so members have been re-uploading sporadically. I am wondering now that you said that if that could have casued the issue?

If it happens again I wil be happy to let you know.

[mferguson]

The issues could be related. Keep me informed and feel free to PM me directly if you see other issues. Thanks!

Mark

[tidefans]

Originally Posted by mferguson

We chose to not develop commenting and reviews since we wanted to gather site owner requirements for these features. As you can imagine these features could easily be abused by members/visitors by way of artificially driving up/down a garage rating, inappropriate comments relative to your site guidelines, etc. Given this I wanted to gather input on how owners would like to see these features managed and calculated (ratings) so that they minimize admin monitoring and provide something useful to the members.

As for the SQL error are you still receiving these? It looks like the above might have been displayed in rendering a Garage pop-up menu.

Thanks!

Mark

I would LOVE to see both commenting and ratings available. Obviously, these could be option-enabled in the admincp for sites like mine where comments on the cars would most likely be positive and appreciated.

thanks for a great product. My members love it!

[mferguson]

Thanks for the feedback. This is something that we're looking at including in a future release of Garage Plus. I'm not sure it will make it into our October release but we'll see what's required and will try to get it in it if we can. Thanks!

Mark

[pelicanparts]

Hey Mark. We just completed the conversion process from our old photo gallery to your new software plugin. We now have 3600+ entries. Unfortunately, not all have photos, but about 1/2 do at this time. If anyone wants to check it out, here's a link to a random page in the garage listings:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/dto_g...added&page=103

-Wayne