Today for approx 10 min I took the site down and updated the Garage feature written by me and my biz partner. The updates are as follows. The implications to our use here on the site are in bold. Changed No Image added image to a more generic image. - We don't use this on M/A as I have the site set to only display Garage that have a main Garage image. Dropped support for vBulletin 3.6 and 3.7 variants. Added support for scale & crop thumbnails, ability to simple change thumb size and have everything regenerate when displayed to improve layout of browse, search, and display interfaces. - M/A is now running a larger image when viewing a Garage. However if the image uploaded is smaller than 200x150 it is not resized. Added rebuild thumbnails utility for when thumbnail sizes are changed, supports both application thumbnails as well as vBadvanced garage module thumbnails. - M/A is now using a larger image in the Random Garages shown on the home page and the single Random Garage shown on the left side of all pages. This image is 150x100. Added separate settings to control garage thumbnails sizing used in vBadvanced modules delivered with Garage products Enable/disable vBadvanced usage Scale, scale & crop thumbnail creation with width and height settings Interface to see current featured garage selections and pick others if selections aren't satisfactory Added counting of garage views - Look in the lower right of the Garage for the views counter. Only views by other users are counted (not by garage owner) Number of views is displayed in the edit garage list interface as well as in the display of a given garage (bottom right corner) Removed dependency on allow_url_fopen PHP setting in order to upload URL based images into Garage. Added Browse Most Popular browse menu option and display. Look in the Garage drop down on the top Navbar. There is now a Browse Most Popular selection. Popularity is based on the number of views. Changed garage view permissions to include "No One", "Friends Only", and "Everyone". In the case that Friends Only is selected only those that are marked as friends of the garage's owner (and members of the Admin usergroup) can see that garage in the following interfaces: Postbit Profile Garage view Index Browse interfaces Advanced search interface Improved Profile tab display of user garages to match that in the browse interfaces.
There are also some Garages that lost images during the Great Data Debacle of '10 however they still are showing in the various displays. Over the next few days I'll be going through them all and contacting the owners to please update. Hence some of the Garages seen that have no image.
Yet another small update to the Garage feature. This one is more visual in nature with the text "Garage" that is in the post header replaced with a graphic created by Tüls inspired by the treatment used on the Swedish MINI Club site New MINI Club Sweden
We've been hard at work updating the Garage again. Even with vBulletin on the 4.x track we have not forgotten about all the sites that are still using 3.8.x successfully. Latest Changes/Updates Massaged database index to speed up image support Updated image upload code to gracefully handle large image uploads While you will not "see" the changes they are in place to speed things up. For those of you that are also using DTO Garage Plus on your Club sites this update will be available for download later in the week after we are sure that the updates are all working properly in a live environment.