Topic: December Updates for Ott-Motorcycles.ca

[npereira]

Hello all,

Long time since the last email. Just a minute to let everyone know about some changes on the website.

1) The site was updated to the new release of software. Some issues where found and have been fixed.
2) The Classifeds section has been updated to the newest release also as some features where not functioning correctly.
3) the BIGEST addition to the site is the Install of a new Media Gallery application. This new addition will give all sorts of fun litle additions comapred to the other gallery application that we where using before. Here is just a few of the new options availble in our new Media Gallery & Auto-embedder:

•Create albums and sub-albums with unlimited levels
•Choose who can view your items, or browse your albums. Allow or ban specific users.
•Supports Images, Audio and Video files, and embedding videos from Youtube, Dailymotion etc.
•Track which items you haven't viewed yet (similar to Unread Posts)
•Search, preview, rate, comment and embed items! It must be worth the exclamation mark!
•Powerful permission and security features, including password protection
•Supports Exif data
•Highslide lightbox animations when opening items
•Mass Upload, Profile areas, video thumbnails...
•Embed tag, allows you to post items into your forum messages
•Per-album permissions!
•Membergroup quotas along with per-album quotas
•Per-album or gallery-wide custom fields
•Can upload any filetype, including documents and custom extensions
•Mass upload through FTP (admins only)
•Mass downloads (zip file with selected files from any album)
•And much, much more...

In addition to the above, we went ahead and purchased the licensed software to get more options and goodies like:
•User Playlists: Give membergroups the permission to create user playlists. Create playlists by simply visiting any item page and clicking the Playlists drop menu and then select "Add to Playlist". Organize your favorites easily and browse them like an album!
•JavaScript + Flash Playlists: Show nice little Flash-powered playlists in these topics, or pretty much anywhere else, based on user playlists or anything you want (one or more items, one or more albums...)
•Linked topics: Create (or not) a linked notification topic automatically when adding/editing an album. You can use this to close per-item comments and have everyone comment on albums instead, or subscribe to topic notifications, or harness the power of other topic-related mods. See it in action at Foxprog, which is entirely built on user playlists, Flash playlists and linked topics. Remember, you can do this with any file type!
•Post button: Add a button to the post area, which opens a popup that will allow you to upload an item and insert it into your message in as few clicks as possible.
•Embedding of remotely hosted pictures: Picasa, Photobucket, Imageshack, anything you can think of. Thumbnails and previews will be created as needed, but the main files themselves will always stay hosted remotely.
•RSS feeds: All albums and items now offer RSS feeds to keep you updated for:
* Latest items - user profiles, albums, album with children, or the entire gallery.
* Latest comments - items, user profiles, albums, album with children, or the entire gallery.


On top of all theses good things, there is also an Auto-Embedder function. Here are more details about it:

Auto-embedder features
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You can now automatically embed video and audio clips by posting the clip's URL into your forum posts from over 200 sites (hundreds if you count the supported networks), including YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Google Video, MySpace, Facebook, Veoh...
No need for BBCode or messy embed HTML. And if a user posts the embed html code for a site, it'll be turned automatically into a nice little furry harmless link.

Just copy the URL from your address bar into a post, and Media Gallery will do the rest. It's the ultimate user-friendly way of posting clips. YouTube videos will automatically appear in HD and Widescreen if available and enabled.

•Admin settings aplenty. Enable/disable embedding, allow embed code fix, use Javascript to embed videos (which is recommended), inline upgrade of Flash version, debug mode for admins, allow for video embedding into quotes or in the middle of sentences...
- Lookups will grab the actual video url/filename when posting a new link.
- Enables support for dozens of sites. Embed local or remote files (except for attachments), such as MP3, MP4, FLV, DivX, Avi, SWF, RM, WMV, MOV...
- And so on.
•Users can select on-the-fly their preferred embed size, normal or maximum (saved in a cookie)
•No manual edits required for custom themes. No conflicts with mods that provide support for a single website with custom BBCode and a video ID. But you'll never want to use them again.

There is so much more that can be done with this new application, that you will have to try it out.

Here comes the bad news. This application is accessible to everyone, even guests, although, only Site Supporters will be able to upload to the site as this is a function we provide to people that support Ott-Motorcycles.ca by donating.

That's it for now, and see you all in the new year.

Nelson Pereira
Owner/Administrator