[DBTech] DragonByte Manuals Library [Paid] 1.0.0

[DragonByte Tech]

DragonByte Tech submitted a new resource:

DragonByte Manuals Library - Upload, browse, read and download PDF manuals organised in categories.

DragonByte Manuals Library is your forum's dedicated place for uploading and accessing manuals for whatever niche your forum caters to.

Fully integrated with XenForo, DragonByte Manuals Library lets your members browse uploaded PDFs without needing to download them first, with optional downloads, controlled via user group (or per-category) permissions.

Part of the All-Access...​

Read more about this resource...

 

[Paul]

Hiya @DragonByte Tech

Liking the look of this a lot... I have a few questions please...

1. what if the manual is a .doc, or a .txt for example - is there any mechanism to allow these to be handled?
2. is there the ability to be able to host this on my Xf instance, however be able to store those documents on a different server - I have loads, but possibly not enough room on my forum host, so would like to be able to pull these from a directory on a remote server/alternative host if it was linked to?
3. possibly an extension to #1 above - I get this is used primarilly for Manuals/documents, however would it be possible for this to be able to allow the user to download anything with a different suffix... e.g. a .bin or .rom file. I realise that probably wasnt in scope, however it allows everything to be kept accessible all vis one interface, rather than having different things being accessed via different methoed, which gets confusing to the user!

Thanks
Paul

 

[DragonByte Tech]

1. what if the manual is a .doc, or a .txt for example - is there any mechanism to allow these to be handled?

At the moment, it's quite heavily reliant on the manual being a PDF. I'll look into the notion of having a similar interface for viewing DOCX or TXT files, though I can't promise anything.

2. is there the ability to be able to host this on my Xf instance, however be able to store those documents on a different server - I have loads, but possibly not enough room on my forum host, so would like to be able to pull these from a directory on a remote server/alternative host if it was linked to?

The manuals are uploaded to XenForo's attachment system, so if you already use something like R2 or whatever it's called, this addon should use that functionality

3. possibly an extension to #1 above - I get this is used primarilly for Manuals/documents, however would it be possible for this to be able to allow the user to download anything with a different suffix... e.g. a .bin or .rom file. I realise that probably wasnt in scope, however it allows everything to be kept accessible all vis one interface, rather than having different things being accessed via different methoed, which gets confusing to the user!

You can technically already achieve this, because in addition to the main manual, you can also attach any file to the description of the entry. In other words; anything your forum allows to be attached, can also be attached using that method - it just won't be considered the "primary" file in the system, if that makes sense!

 

[Paul]

Thanks for getting back to me @DragonByte Tech

At the moment, it's quite heavily reliant on the manual being a PDF. I'll look into the notion of having a similar interface for viewing DOCX or TXT files, though I can't promise anything.

If you could please that would be great. to be fair, probably 75% of my docs are in pdf, however there's some stuff that are related notes that are .txt or .doc files.

The manuals are uploaded to XenForo's attachment system, so if you already use something like R2 or whatever it's called, this addon should use that functionality

Ahh that might prove a problem. Storage from my host isnt cheap. Being able to pull from one of my VPS's (4tb) is. And i have a LOT (2k+) of documents that could use this system. Maybe something as simple as a direct link in the setup for that document entry to be able to pull from an alternate source would work!

 

[DragonByte Tech]

If you could please that would be great. to be fair, probably 75% of my docs are in pdf, however there's some stuff that are related notes that are .txt or .doc files.

Parsing .doc files is turning out to be harder than .docx. Because .doc is a proprietary MS Word document format, it would need to be converted on upload before the inline browser could work. .docx is fine because it's basically a structured zip file in a trench coat.

The conversion would require you to install a LibreOffice binary on your server and enter the path to it in an option similar to how pdftotext can be installed to extract text from PDF files.

Are your files in .doc or .docx?

Ahh that might prove a problem. Storage from my host isnt cheap. Being able to pull from one of my VPS's (4tb) is. And i have a LOT (2k+) of documents that could use this system. Maybe something as simple as a direct link in the setup for that document entry to be able to pull from an alternate source would work!

wouldn't it make sense to store all your attachments on the VPS then? If you have access to your host's root configuration, you could mount the VPS (via SMB or similar) as a folder on your host and set your internal-data folder to be stored in that folder instead.

Or if your VPS offers an AWS S3 compatible endpoint (examples include AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Backblaze B2, Wasabi and MinIO), XenForo supports moving your data and internal-data folders.

I'm a bit hesitant because an explicitly stated goal of the addon is to avoid relying on externally hosted resources, and allowing external links in the form would encourage hotlinks to resources not in the control of the site owner, even if that doesn't apply in your specific case.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

DragonByte Tech updated [DBTech] DragonByte Manuals Library with a new update entry:

1.0.0 Beta 2

Update highlights​

This version adds support for .docx and .txt files to be used as manuals. These file types get a very similar preview feature, just without inline searching and without page thumbnails.

Complete Change Log​

Feature: Manuals can now be uploaded as Word (.docx) or plain text (.txt) files as well as PDFs, with page links, page text and search for every type

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[DragonByte Tech]

DragonByte Tech updated [DBTech] DragonByte Manuals Library with a new update entry:

1.0.0

Update highlights​

After a successful Beta period, this addon is now considered fully stable

This version fixes a server error that would occur when updating manuals views on newer versions of MySQL.

Complete Change Log​

Fix: Fixed a database error when updating manual view counts on MySQL 8.4 and newer

Read the rest of this update entry...