New forum features

[Eugen]

Great news! Little by little we grow and improve. Ultimately it's the people that make a community great!

[Eugen]

The manuals section of our site

manuals

has been giving me all kinds of trouble. It sits on disk as a plain old directory and files tree all under "manuals" and I used two different html generators to create the downloadable links for all the pdf file. The first script did not generate mobile friendly pages and both google and bing complained and refused to index. The second script was a well written php script that rendered the contents on the fly, and the result was beautiful, and mobile friendly. Except it went somehow into a recursive loop that google really didn't like, so it again refused to index it.

I changed it again, generating the html pages of all the manuals pdf files using the unix program 'tree' and then making the result mobile and search engine friendly by modifying the pages with a couple of scripts I wrote. Not as beautiful rendering as the php script, but as far as I can tell it should be indexable by the two major search engines.

If this works as it should, we might get higher in searches and perhaps get new users from that. At the moment the other site gets all the new users.

[Timj]

Glad you know what you are doing when it comes to these things. hope it doesn't cost you too much time in your already busy schedule.

[Eugen]

hope it doesn't cost you too much time in your already busy schedule.

How much sleep does one need anyway?!

[Eugen]

One of our users pointed out that attachments are not enabled in private messaging. The problem with allowing attachments in private messages is that users send each other large files and the forum storage can get filled up pretty quickly. This would not be good for anyone, so I have enabled only small (up to 512KB) attachments, and only of type document (pdf) and text.

If you guys want to exchange larger files please do it via your personal email.
Thanks!
Eugen

[Eugen]

Testing lightbox extension which displays images in a nice light box that opens up when you click on an image.


Without this extension the image was open on a new page in the browser.

Please comment if you would rather prefer the old way.


Edit: when viewed from a phone, the mobile page still shows it the old way.

[Eugen]

I have installed an extension which puts a button in the upper right corner like this:

So that if Guillame or if we have other people wanting to translate into their language, they could read our forum easily, and write in their own language if they so wish.

[Eugen]

@Doublet has suggested an extension to the forum, named Pages. This allows for static pages. To give you an example, the entire rest of the forum is dynamic content, meaning everything you can see is retrieved from a database when you click on things. The static Pages are sitting somewhere as they were written. I'm not sure how we can use this yet, maybe for a new area of the Technical library. I wrote a small page whose link appears at the top to the right of the "Board index" link.


I also created a new Forum named Technical Library. Maybe in that forum we put all manuals with nice links to them, so that it's easier to find the manula for a particular tractor with a particular serial number.

I'm still unsure what makes more sense, so if you have suggestions fire at will

[Doublet]

@Doublet has suggested an extension to the forum, named Pages. This allows for static pages. To give you an example, the entire rest of the forum is dynamic content, meaning everything you can see is retrieved from a database when you click on things. The static Pages are sitting somewhere as they were written. I'm not sure how we can use this yet, maybe for a new area of the Technical library. I wrote a small page whose link appears at the top to the right of the "Board index" link.

I also created a new Forum named Technical Library. Maybe in that forum we put all manuals with nice links to them, so that it's easier to find the manuals for a particular tractor with a particular serial number.
I'm still unsure what makes more sense, so if you have suggestions fire at will

@Eugen
I am still studying the pages extension and currently believe the Admin could use it to create a very nice place for the manuals and or Static links to current members YouTube Colt Case Ingersoll repair videos. I don't have a lot of experience with video but it makes perfect sense to store these video elsewhere but have immediate access through the forum pages. I know of a couple of members that have excellent videos all ready posted.

I have in the past created what is called a binder that contains, (Example: all of the 100 Series manuals in one PDF file) The file then instead containing 130-180 manual it would contain. All the manuals for 108,110,111,112,114,116,118,120,150,155,195 in one binder.

My reasoning for this is when you need a manual you could download a 100-200-300-400 or Ingersoll series manual as needed and then they could be stored on your computer in one place. This could also apply to attachments, etc. Instead of scattered files (Although a little large sized (roughly 20 megs is the limit) they are together. I will let you know what I find out. May take a little time.

Thanks to @Eugen and @Spike188 for working so hard to make sure this board is done right.

Doublet

[Doublet]

@Eugen I didn't read the above post about link. I'm bad. I actually remembered or thought I did there was a way to put an icon of the manual on the static pages. I will re edit this in a few minutes.

This is what member would see to click on. As many manuals that could fit on a page could be viewed at one time.
Doublet (Terry)