Announcement Most liked posts in thread: Welcome to the New Motoring Alliance Site

FYI - working on the "Racing" section of the forum right now. Just letting you know if you see a few things move around.

 

Thanks!! There is lots more to come. Once I finish with the core Forum... I will be working on the garages and classifieds. Both will have the ability to be searched and “refined” by checking a box to filter into what you want to see..

 

If you have questions - let me know. Make sure you take a look at the “How Do I” section.

 

All -

What are the next things I will be working on:

• Continued configuration and bug fixes and “how do I” articles. Keep the feedback coming!
• Articles & Home Page - going to do some preliminary work here. By that I mean formatting, layout and configuration. (Phase 1 - next few days will be pretty basic).
• Garages & Market -(Currently called showcase). This is where most of my time will be spent. Like the forums it will be a phased process. However here are the highlights:
  • Classifieds - So the one downside of this platform is classifieds. By that I mean I really wanted something “easy” that worked well as a market place. Searchable, Filterable, etc. There are no good plugins for this. So I designed a way to use showcase to do this. I did this for two reasons:
  1. I can make the presentation of what you are trying to sell much better (I think.. you tell me when done)
  2. It will be searchable and can have on screen “refinement”
  3. I can do this native without additional add-on’s etc.
  4. Ultimately the next version of Xenforo (the platform this site runs on) has a much better framework for things like classifieds. It was just released so I went with the “stable” platform. Once its stabilized and the few add on’s/plugins are ported and stable we will be able to upgrade quickly.

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  • Garages - going to normalize as much of the vehicle information like “models.” This will allow you to go in and refine what you want to see very quickly. Example, R53/Cooper/S. It will work like “amazon” or “eBay” with check boxes. Some of this is “automated”.. much will be manual which I’m still trying to figure out a way not to have to do it that way. It will be Phased and take time..
• Library - Short answer is that was a seperate plugin on vb and its a custom import script that “mostly” worked on different test we ran. By that I mean it moved over the data but there was still some limited requirements for the old system and photo location. Ideally I would be able to import this directly in so its 100% native. This will help with upgrades etc going forward or I will do it manually.

Ultimately - we’ve laid the foundation... we got the engine running. Now its doing the exterior, aero, tuning etc.

Keep the feedback coming, make suggestions. Its your site.

Josh

 

Thanks! Lots more to do... still shaking out the base. Hope I can be working on Garages (Showcase) etc. this weekend. No way it would have happened MCSO2 and Steve.

 

FYI - this evening and tonight you may see layouts change on the articles page while I work on formatting and fixing some of the open items..

 

OK - so, reverted some of the changes I made to articles.. was having some unexpected results. Have to do some research. Now working on "Garages"... that will be a multi-phase process. You will start to see some "Legacy" tags. Once I have the data normalized, it will then be moved into the new tags. After tonight if you go in and update/edit your "garage" you will see new buttons/selections which over time will allow you to quickly refine what garages you can see.

 

1/25/18 update
1) Over the last few days I’ve been MCS02 and I have been working on importing the library. If you go to “articles” and look on the left under categories you will see what’s there so far. There is still a lot of work to do... but it’s moving slowly.
2) The “New Post” button is in progress.
3) The old IMG and AME tags. There is some work there. Essentially that fox will provide a short outage as it will require running a script against the DB. Therefore the safest thing is to take a backup and turn it off for a few minutes while the script runs. I want to do this against the test site first. However the articles need to come over first. Plus if there is other maintenance to do against the DB I will do that at the same time. Having any sort of downtime should be very rare. But in this case it’s part of the ongoing clean up. Once I have a schedule on that I will let you know.
4) Garages - I’m working on that also. Most likely during that down time I will run a script to normalize the fields (Make, Model, year.. etc). Ideally it will also move that information into the new fields that will be sortable etc.

I’m heading out for a few days. MSC02 is going to continue with migrating the articles etc. I’ll be on and off in limited capacity I think.

That’s all for now -