This is the support/feature request thread for Advanced Downloads.

 

So once it's approved, what does Advanced Downloads do?

Just now, Joy Rex said:

So once it's approved, what does Advanced Downloads do?

Hey @Joy Rex! Advanced Downloads for IPS4 gives administrators more control over downloads in the IPS Community Suite. The functionality can be made available to everyone on your site, to specific groups of users, applied to specific forums and categories, and even display a custom error message to users without permission. Advanced Downloads integrates seamlessly into the Forums, Downloads, and Gallery applications. 

The core functionality allows your community to download attachments from forum posts, download file submissions, and gallery albums dynamically as one compressed ZIP archive with the click of a button, with very little memory overhead and no additional storage requirements. In the case of the Download application, users are presented with the ability to select specific files and download all of the selected files as a single compressed archive. In addition to the core functionality, layout and sorting customizations are also available, and more functionality is on the way.

Ah, pretty cool - I can see where there would be a need for this on communities who share things via attachments, or in general if somebody wanted to say download all the attachments from a thread.

What would be a neat expansion of this (if possible) is to allow a user to view all attachments (images) in a thread via the lightbox image viewer, and offer the mass-download link there. I know I've gotten that request from my community members who use Tapatalk (it offers you a way to browse the attached images in a thread separate of the posts).

1 minute ago, Joy Rex said:

Ah, pretty cool - I can see where there would be a need for this on communities who share things via attachments, or in general if somebody wanted to say download all the attachments from a thread.

What would be a neat expansion of this (if possible) is to allow a user to view all attachments (images) in a thread via the lightbox image viewer, and offer the mass-download link there. I know I've gotten that request from my community members who use Tapatalk (it offers you a way to browse the attached images in a thread separate of the posts).

It's a must-have for our community, so we took the time to develop the application. We're pretty happy with it so far. As for your idea... we're on the same page. For the first round of development, we focused pretty exclusively on Downloads, and even then there's still some work to do. We have several more views and customizations that we want to add in. Forum attachments are next on the list. Personally, I hate the way standard IPS forum attachments look. I had the idea to display each attachment with an icon and more information, much like what you'd see if you attached a file to an email in Outlook. I'm sure for images we could have a lightbox on hover, and maybe even a download option in the lightbox that would grab all of the attachments. That one I'll have to look into. Great suggestion!

I actually thought there was something like this in the Marketplace .

Was this something you took over from Makoto

 

 

 

3 hours ago, CinemaVision said:

Personally, I hate the way standard IPS forum attachments look. I had the idea to display each attachment with an icon and more information, much like what you'd see if you attached a file to an email in Outlook. I'm sure for images we could have a lightbox on hover, and maybe even a download option in the lightbox that would grab all of the attachments.

Yes please.  

You even have an option to fill empty categories with files from subcategories in IP.Downloads.  WITH TWO LAYOUT OPTIONS!!  

You have beautiful iconography to download from both albums and categories in IP.Gallery.  

I don't know if I can handle how amazing this plugin is.  

I even emailed marketplace@invisionpower.com for them to expressly approve your plugin so I could check it out.  Just putting that out there.  

(This is how Joel felt when he went through the screenshots for Advanced Downloads.  True story.  God actually cast his glorious light down.  Or maybe I turned on my fluorescent overhead lights to see better.  But whatever.  It felt divine when I saw this plugin.)  

Too bad I can't use yet.  Ping me once you support AWS.  

9 hours ago, Joel R said:

You even have an option to fill empty categories with files from subcategories in IP.Downloads.  WITH TWO LAYOUT OPTIONS!!  

You have beautiful iconography to download from both albums and categories in IP.Gallery.  

I don't know if I can handle how amazing this plugin is.  

I even emailed marketplace@invisionpower.com for them to expressly approve your plugin so I could check it out.  Just putting that out there.  

(This is how Joel felt when he went through the screenshots for Advanced Downloads.  True story.  God actually cast his glorious light down.  Or maybe I turned on my fluorescent overhead lights to see better.  But whatever.  It felt divine when I saw this plugin.)  

Too bad I can't use yet.  Ping me once you support AWS.  

Thanks for the kind words! We've got plans to go even further with all of the features, so definitely stay tuned. We're already about 50% done with the work for AWS. It's a bit more tricky to get the core functionality working via AWS, but I'll hit you up the second we have it working. The hardest part has been getting it to work as quickly as we want it to. Downloads seem to start slower, because of the way AWS works. We picked back up working on AWS last night.

This is an amazing plugin - as soon as I upgrade to IPS 4, I'm getting this for my community. This should be a standard core feature, really!

Is there a demo someone I can try? 

On 9/28/2016 at 5:13 PM, Joel R said:

I actually thought there was something like this in the Marketplace .

Was this something you took over from Makoto

 

There was indeed. I was one of the many who got burned by Makoto. I bought Bulk Downloader and that guy straight disappeared about 2 months later and the application was unusable. That's why Advanced Downloads came to be. All of the suggestions I gave Makoto for improvements went into Advanced Downloads.

On 9/29/2016 at 9:56 AM, Joy Rex said:

This is an amazing plugin - as soon as I upgrade to IPS 4, I'm getting this for my community. This should be a standard core feature, really!

Hey thanks! I agree it should be standard, but I'm happy to do the legwork.

21 hours ago, CP said:

Is there a demo someone I can try? 

You know, I never thought about building a demo. I'll have to look into that. Right now, there's no demo available.

22 hours ago, CP said:

Is there a demo someone I can try? 

I went ahead and set it up so you all can see it in action on our test site. Here are the credentials and permissions:

Guests: No permissions to use Advanced Downloads functionality, will get the custom error message when they try to use it.
Members: Permission to use Advanced Downloads functionality. (Log in with the credentials Member/member)

Hopefully that gives you all an idea of what to expect at least on the front end.

I will give it a try a little later on today.  

24 minutes ago, CP said:

I will give it a try a little later on today.  

I'm going to try to set it up so that you don't have to log in to see the functionality here in a minute. Please keep in mind that this is the same site we're actively developing on, so while we work on new builds things might break.

cool! 

I just wanted to say that I have been using this for almost two weeks now and it's just freaking amazing.  Really excited what you add next to it.  Thank you, after bulk downloader didn't pan out I was really bummed out.  You have completely solved that problem for me.  THANK YOU

Let me know once you support Amazon AWS

For those of you interested, I wanted to share one of the features we're currently working on that will be available in the next release of Advanced Downloads. There are several improvements and features being added in, including different styles for forum attachments, forum attachment sorting, AWS support and more. The feature we'll be previewing today is menu modifications for the Downloads sidebar menu.

First up, we made the default IPS menu collapsible.

Then we decided to add one more style for launch, this is a mock-up of that style.

Also included are several other menu options to make navigation a little less cumbersome, and a lot more customizable. Hopefully, this shows those of you who are gun-shy about purchasing Advanced Downloads that we absolutely plan to support and improve upon it.

On 11/4/2016 at 0:01 AM, CinemaVision said:

different styles for forum attachments

Would love this

On 11/4/2016 at 0:01 AM, CinemaVision said:

forum attachment sorting

I couldn't see any difference or options when doing a test on your demo board.  

22 hours ago, Joel R said:

Would love this

I couldn't see any difference or options when doing a test on your demo board.  

Right now, we're working on fixing the CSS for some of the different options, so we have it set to the specific styles and options that we're having issues with. Here's what they look like, and the icon size, font sizes, and the image preview size are all configurable in settings so you can customize the look. The issue we're working through involves the default image behavior. We were having CSS issues when images were embedded. Instead of embedding, it's trying to attach them. The icons are set from Font Awesome based on the extension of the file you attach.

Top Icon

Top Icon (showing image hover)

Left Icon

At the very least, I figured that would be a good start.

@CinemaVision

Any updates regarding AWS?  

On 12/3/2016 at 10:18 AM, Joel R said:

@CinemaVision

Any updates regarding AWS?  

One update... Amazon is not being very kind. It's actually easy to get working if we pull the file down to the local webserver and serve it up that way, but that defeats the purpose. We're trying to find a way around Amazons restrictions so we can stream the file from AWS directly to the end user. In short: It's not working the way we want it to work, but we're still working on AWS support.

Is this used with the Downloads package from Invision or is it used instead of the download package?

2 minutes ago, derekg said:

Is this used with the Downloads package from Invision or is it used instead of the download package?

This is not a replacement for IP.Downloads.  

Ths integrates into IP.Board, IP.Gallery, IP.Downloads, etc. and extends downloading capabilities.