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

[Kolbi]

At http://www.2-wheel-planet.de/profile.php?do=editoptions there is another little issue
Uncached templates: dto_garage_usercp (1)

[mferguson]

I've verified this and will add this to our next release fixes.

In regard to the UserCP interface for Garage I would like some feedback. With the addition of My Garage in the navbar link we are considering removing the UserCP method of accessing and managing garages. We are considering this because of a number of factors. The first is that this, in comparison to the navbar option, is quite hidden the user has to be educated where it is located. The second is that in order to deliver this functionality we require the site owner to modify the USERCP_SHELL template since there is not a template hook present. This will present a problem if/when vB delivers an update version of this template.

The question is would site owners and members find removing the manage garage functionality from UserCP a problem?

Thanks for the feedback!

Mark

[Kolbi]

I would say, that this modification should/can be optionally.
People who use TMS doesn?t matter about vb updates.
I would prefer if the USERCP_SHELL modification wouldn?t be removed in further versions.

That?s my opinion

[Miss Chatterbox]

Oh dear I really am having one of "those" days! Sometimes I think technology hates me!

Right well I've tried installing this and when I clicked on garages in the navbar I got an error message saying "could not find dto_garage.php" on the server.

Any ideas why this has happened? I've uploaded the "upload" folder to my forum's root directory and chmod the images folder to 0777 so I don't know what I've missed.

Maybe I should just go to bed and then hopefully everthing will be fixed when I wake up! lol!

[mferguson]

Originally Posted by Miss Chatterbox

Oh dear I really am having one of "those" days! Sometimes I think technology hates me!

Right well I've tried installing this and when I clicked on garages in the navbar I got an error message saying "could not find dto_garage.php" on the server.

Any ideas why this has happened? I've uploaded the "upload" folder to my forum's root directory and chmod the images folder to 0777 so I don't know what I've missed.

Maybe I should just go to bed and then hopefully everthing will be fixed when I wake up! lol!

Be glad to help. Can you PM me your site information and I'll visit to see what's going on?

Also, just to confirm did you copy everything from the upload directory in the package to your forum root directory? You should see dto_garage.php in your forum root if everything got copied up correctly.

Thanks!

Mark

[Miss Chatterbox]

Originally Posted by mferguson

Be glad to help. Can you PM me your site information and I'll visit to see what's going on?

Also, just to confirm did you copy everything from the upload directory in the package to your forum root directory? You should see dto_garage.php in your forum root if everything got copied up correctly.

Thanks!

Mark

PM sent.

[mferguson]

Just replied back to your PM. It appears that you ftp'd the entire upload directory up to your server rather than just the contents of the upload directory. Should be a quick fix.

Thanks!

Mark

[Miss Chatterbox]

Originally Posted by mferguson

Just replied back to your PM. It appears that you ftp'd the entire upload directory up to your server rather than just the contents of the upload directory. Should be a quick fix.

Thanks!

Mark

Woohoo! I now have garages!!! Oooh and they look so pretty! Can't wait to upload my car! Thank you so much Mark!

[mferguson]

Great! Glad its working for you now. Let me know if you need any additional assistance.

Thanks!

Mark

[Za4a Tuner]

Hello Mark,
at first -> thanks for this great mod, i was searching for something like that for a long time

But:
I've got some questions and some "things to do".

question 1:
Is it possible, to allow more than 3 pictures per categorie? I'd like to allow something about 4 or 5 picture in every categorie like "under the hood" and "interior".
Is there a way, to have there an option at the acp to set a number of allowed pictures? (May be in a future version???)
If not, is there a easy way to set a higher number of allowed pictures per plug-in or php-code changes?


question 2:
Can you do an option in the ACP to turn the "automatic appearing links" (postbit, navbar, memberinfo, ...) ON or OFF?
This would be nice


question 3:
I don't use SEO.
In your GOLD-version SEO is listet. Can this version be used WITHOUT having SEO installed?


question 4:
What currency do have?
The GOLD-version is about 95.- xx?


Some found "bugs":
vBulletin is full xhtml-valid.
Your add-on even not!
But i think, an xhtml-valide code can easy be done.
For example, you should

• replace <br> by <br />
• close every img-tag by using " />" at the end of every img-code, like: [....]/1/1000t.jpg" />
• sometimes you have double specifications like : <td align="left" class="alt1" align="center">
• in the tag >fieldset> the attribute "width" can't be used
• some "tr-tags" are missed between "table" and "td"
• insted of "<hr>" u shuold use "<hr />" (if the tag isn't closed by an "/hr"-Tag)
• hardcoded "phrases" -> fully phrased out is better for translations (i know, you will do this in future version)
• ...

I think, i will use your add-on in my board. To use the free or the gold-version depends on what feauture can be made real, and using xhtml.


kr Chris