Links and Downloads Manager

LDM extends VBulletin to manage a library of documents, files and links to other web sites. Documents can be stored on your own web site, stored on your server separate from the web site, uploaded by your user community, or held somewhere else altogether. So you can use LDM to provide your user community with access to your own files and allow them to share files with each other.

12/08/06 - Versions that work with vb36 are available and supported in the VB36 thread. Version 2.2.1, which works with VB 3.5 but not with VB 3.6, remains available here.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with all the design, testing, etc.
Translations are provided (thanks dLutt and LeeWicked) into German, (thanks to Allan) into French, and (thanks to Hugo) into Spanish. Harry1951 has handled the Dutch translation.

Screenshots, Instructions and How to Install

Full details and instructions are available as a Wiki at http://www.eirma.org/wikis/index.php...nloads_Manager

LDM installs as a VBulletin product. There are no modifications required to standard VB code.

Basically - upload php files and run the installer through VB's Product installer. No changes needed to VB code. Remember to BACKUP YOUR DATABASE. By default, LDM prefixes its database tables 'local_'. Edit the configuration file, local_links_init.php, if you need/wish to change this.

LDM can handle an essentially unlimited number of categories and nested subcategories, and an unlimited number of entries (hyperlinks or downloadable files). Each entry can be placed in one or several categories. Categories can have styles. Descriptions and titles can optionally include BBcodes, smilies, images and html, giving the possibility to add images, colouring, etc. File types can be flagged using icons and individual entries can also have associated thumbnail images.

Standards templates are provided for libraries of links, files, documents, and photographs.

Users can offer comments and rate the links/downloads. Each user is allowed one rating and many comments per entry, and can freely edit these if they change their mind.

Permission to use specific features is established via the product's admin page, where the administrator specifies which usergroups can add and edit entries, comment and rate these entries, moderate, etc.

By default, all entries are visible to all users. You can restrict visibility/access to links and categories by using the permissions masks from your board's forums.

Moderation of new entries is available but turned off by default.

Users can report bad links to the relevant moderators/administrators.

Each user can flag links as his/her "Favourites".

Modules are provided for VBAdvanced.

Hooks are provided in suitable places in LDM and sample plugins are included in the release (see extras directory), for example to integrate with ID3 tags in mp3 files, for slideshows, to autocreate new threads in your forums, etc.

Plus much more.

[dfdems]

150 or so it is!

as far as the movies, they have always been up, mainly only to registered users as a hook I guess to get people to register. I think in a year I have hit 6% of my monthly limit for bandwidth and that was when I uploaded all of them.

If I linked them it would be as movies/moviename.dhe whatever vs. the http: route. I am assuming if I do it that way they embed and auto play? I am not to keen on auto play but I am trying to understand the media player in this I guess, I had assumed it was for MP3's. Would I have to add the media extensions to the list?

[Evil X]

anyway to make it so when they add a link it also makes a thread in a selected forum, wit hthe title and the link in it, ect?

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by dfdems

150 or so it is!

as far as the movies, they have always been up, mainly only to registered users as a hook I guess to get people to register. I think in a year I have hit 6% of my monthly limit for bandwidth and that was when I uploaded all of them.

If I linked them it would be as movies/moviename.dhe whatever vs. the http: route. I am assuming if I do it that way they embed and auto play? I am not to keen on auto play but I am trying to understand the media player in this I guess, I had assumed it was for MP3's. Would I have to add the media extensions to the list?

I found this all a bit complicated !! It works as follows:

- Assuming the filetype is registered in the vb/attachments table, then - when the use clicks on the link - LDM sends the headers that are defined in that table, then dumps the contents of the file. Normally, that will produce an Open/Save As dialog at the user's end - but depending on the software that has been installed, it may fire up an application. Adobe Acrobat is the worst culprit in this regard.

- If the filetype is not registered in the vb/attachments table, behaviour depends on the browser and software loaded on the user's computer. It may or may not offer an open/save dialog or simply fire up an application.

So in general it's a good idea to register the file types in vb/attachments so that there's more control.

- For the embedded player, this only works for registered filetypes. It behaves the same way as a normal 'click' except that the material is diverted to an embedded Windows Media Player. This will work for videos, except - as far as I understand - WMP will wait until the complete file is downloaded before it starts playing. I have not looked into what happens with Real Media .rm files, etc, which I think tell the player to start work immediately.

Hope this helps.

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by ExtProof

anyway to make it so when they add a link it also makes a thread in a selected forum, wit hthe title and the link in it, ect?

Not for links, but when you create a category, there's an option to 'autocreate' a subforum in the category's parent forum, so this gives the user a 'one-click' way of finding all the associated entries.

One difficulty with this is that VB does not seem to have a way to track 'when last updated' for these pseudo-forums that are in fact links somewhere else, so the user does not get to see when something new appeared. This may just be a matter of writing a timestamp into the forum description table, but I haven't tested this.

[dfdems]

Sorry for the confusion, I will give it a shot and post the results back here. thanks again for your help

[fringehead]

Thanks for the update! Very cool to have the file uploads.

My forum is in a subdomain. I am trying to input an upload directory off my forum url. I have chmoded it to 777 to test and it won't take my directory in the upload_directory setting.

If my local_file_root_prefix is /var/www/forums I should be able to enter "videos" into the upload_dir if the directory is /var/www/forums/videos ??? For some reason anything I enter into this field is not accepted.

Thank You for the help!

Sean

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by fringehead

My forum is in a subdomain. I am trying to input an upload directory off my forum url. I have chmoded it to 777 to test and it won't take my directory in the upload_directory setting.

If my local_file_root_prefix is /var/www/forums I should be able to enter "videos" into the upload_dir if the directory is /var/www/forums/videos ??? For some reason anything I enter into this field is not accepted.

Thank You for the help!

Sean

I tried this with a test site which sits in http://ipaddress/local_site/forums etc. The directory holding http://ipaddress/local_site is /data/www/sites/local_site and I want to store uploads in subdirectories of /uploads which sits in the local_site directory. So I set *local_file_root* to 1, *local_file_root_prefix* to /data/www/sites/local_site and *upload_dir* to /uploads, and it all works correctly for me.

[BeasTboyz]

Originally Posted by AndrewD

The main factor influencing download speed is whether you identify the files as full urls or as filenames without a url. The worst case is when the url points to someone else's server, but http://yoursite/dir/file.type will be much slower that /dir/file.type

I pull from my server a few directories back, ../../blah/blah/file.type so I would figure it would be nice and fast and I thought it was before the upgrade. Is it still true that if we link to another domain's files it will pull from their server, through us (thus we're downloading and re-uploading the file)?

Originally Posted by AndrewD

Yes, I agree. Actually, it will accept the same format as the php.ini file, i.e. a number optionally followed by K, M or G

Sounds good to me

Originally Posted by AndrewD

No, the file types that can be uploaded are read from the VB attachments table (VB/admincp/attachmenets/extensions and sizes) and in that you can set the maximum size per filetype

Is it your intention to never seperate this from the vB attachments area? What if we don't want to allow the attachments in threads of certain files, only in our Links/Downloads manager?

Thanks for the help

Matt

[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by BeasTboyz

I pull from my server a few directories back, ../../blah/blah/file.type so I would figure it would be nice and fast and I thought it was before the upgrade.

I don't know what to say. I've just tested our primary server, which we access via ADSL - a 1.6Mb word file came down from LDM at 160 kbytes/sec, which is close to the limit that we can achieve from the ADSL service to which we subscribe. (I have a test script on that server to test theoretical speed of line + server - it reported 126 kbytes/sec, but I imagine that LDM achieved some compression with the word file).

Originally Posted by BeasTboyz

Is it still true that if we link to another domain's files it will pull from their server, through us (thus we're downloading and re-uploading the file)?

That's got to be true unless you set force_download to expose the link so that the user's browser can get straight to the host domain.

Originally Posted by BeasTboyz

Is it your intention to never separate this from the vB attachments area? What if we don't want to allow the attachments in threads of certain files, only in our Links/Downloads manager?

I'll never say never, but I do prefer not to rewrite code that's already written and properly supported by the VB people.

*Edited* - by the way, I think you can disable filetypes in the VB admincp as far as having them as allowed attachments. LDM will still pick them up as acceptable.

[BeasTboyz]

Very strange that I'm not getting good speeds. The server only hosts my small site and its a dual xeon 2.8ghz with 1gb ram and 2x120gb drives. If you had any suggestions for what to check, I'd certainly appreciate it, otherwise I'll just see what I can do with testing different methods.

Thanks again, Andrew

Matt