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]

Guest users shouldn't be able to add or manage a garage so the patch I put together resolves this issue.

I'll push out an update tomorrow morning that will include the patch and a random garage index page.

Thanks!

Mark

[corsacrazy]

had another error, be it hosting related or not maybe there is something which can be done ?

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 12288 bytes) in /home/midnight/public_html/forum/dto_garage.php on line 906

[mferguson]

Are you on a shared hosting box? If so, this indicates that you've run out of memory when trying to process an image you uploaded into Garage. Usually, on a shared box, you can specify a custom php.ini for your directories to run with. You would want to tweak the following:

• memory_limit
• upload_max_filesize (optional)
• max_execution_time (optional)

Since all hosting companies offer different ways to handle this be sure to check with them before doing anything. For memory_limit most hosts have this set as small as 8M. I would recommend at least 32M or more if your host will support it.

Mark

[corsacrazy]

Originally Posted by mferguson

Are you on a shared hosting box? If so, this indicates that you've run out of memory when trying to process an image you uploaded into Garage. Usually, on a shared box, you can specify a custom php.ini for your directories to run with. You would want to tweak the following:

• memory_limit
• upload_max_filesize (optional)
• max_execution_time (optional)

Since all hosting companies offer different ways to handle this be sure to check with them before doing anything. For memory_limit most hosts have this set as small as 8M. I would recommend at least 32M or more if your host will support it.

Mark

sure.

my settings are

PHP Max Post Size 8.00 MB

PHP Maximum Upload Size 2.00 MB

PHP Memory Limit 32.00 MB


i will just upload a custom php ini

[mferguson]

If, after changing your php.ini, you still have problems contact me via PM and I can arrange a way to get a copy of the file you are attempting to upload. With that we can attempt to reproduce the problem on one of our test servers and determine if there is something more we can tweak.

Thanks!

Mark

[MikesSite]

I would love to use this but there is only an option for "Help" under the Garage navbar menu. I also manually added the info into USERCP_SHELL to be able to access the garage from User CP.

Can you let me know how to fix this problem? How do I view the overall garage?

[mferguson]

Help is the only option shown in the free version of Garage. If you purchase a copy of Garage Plus this menu will include browse and search functions in addition to help.

As for the User CP shell modification you mention I'm not sure I understand what you are attempting to do. For a garage owner you should already have options to manage and add a garage entry under when using User CP.

Also, what do you mean by overall garage? If you are asking where are garage entries displayed they are found in the following places:

- if a user has created a garage entry and it is visible to other site members a "Garage" link will be shown in the postbit for that user. Clicking on that link will display a pop-up menu where you can select the garage to display. When clicked on a new page should open displaying that user's complete garage.

- in the user profile for each user having a garage entry (and its visible) there will be an additional tab in the profile called Garage. If selected you will see a thumbnail of the vehicle and its name.

As I just completed a video demo of Garage Plus I would recommend taking a look at the video as it explains a lot of the functionality offered in Garage Plus and I also note what features are not available in the free version. Click here to check out the video.

Also, I noted above that I will be providing a random garage index page in an update I hope to release tomorrow morning. This will provide another way of browsing garages that have been entered on your site. In our next major release we're planning a more interesting index page with random garages, most viewed, featured, stats, etc along with being fully phrased so it can be adapted for different languages. This will be available around mid-September.

Mark

[bada_bing]

can I add a suggestion that you can control or changes the filed names. This way this nice plugin can be used for other things except car sites such as other hobby related sites.

[mferguson]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

can I add a suggestion that you can control or changes the filed names. This way this nice plugin can be used for other things except car sites such as other hobby related sites.

You can already do this by viewing the vBulletin Options for DTO Garage. You can change most of the section and subsection titles to support whatever you need.

That said the product was intended to mainly address the needs of motor-related interests. For more flexibility in modeling all types of information, sharing it, etc. we developed another product, ShowCase, that addresses those types of needs.

Mark

[adambloch]

Looks like a pretty smart Mod. No problems installing for me.

Is there a method for Admins/Mods to edit (or even just delete) users' Garages in case the feature is being abused?

Thanks,

Adam