LDM Categories

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Administration Introduction Control Settings Permissions Controlling Access Monitoring and Controlling Usage Database Imports and Exports Content Overview/Mass Editing Entry Attributes Where are Files Stored?
Moderation Introduction Design Layout and Design Advanced vbAdvanced Subscriptions Add-on Extras Media Players Mirrors Synchronising Categories and Directories Hacking LDM Search Engine Optimisation
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Contents 1 Mass Edits 2 Regular Expression Edits 3 Scanning web directories for new files

Mass Edits

LDM->Admin->Mass Edits take you to summary information on the full contents of the categories in your database; and provides the means to mass edit categories and entries in these categories, and to fill categories by scanning directories on your server.

Mass editing provides a powerful way to update many items at once:

• For entries, the available edits include moving entries to another category, changing the forum that defines entries' viewing permissions, hiding entries, editing entries' names, urls, image urls and submitting users, and assigning keywords.
• Categories can be emptied and deleted, closed and opened, desynchronised and have different forums associated.

Regular Expression Edits

Mass edits of entry names, descriptions, urls and image urls use the full Perl regular expression syntax. For a tutorial on Perl-style regular expressions, see, e.g., perl.org.

Scanning web directories for new files

LDM can automatically synchronise categories with the contents of directories on your web site, see Synchronising Categories and Directories. It is also possible to carry out scans manually using commands available within LDM->Admin->Mass Edits.

Select the scan link, then use the drop down menu to select a directory, repeating the process as required to traverse the directory tree. The visible directories are restricted in the usual way by the settings of local_file_root and local_file_root_prefix.

LDM presents a list of files that:

• have recognised mime types,
• are not already in the database, and
• are not listed in the 'ignore.dat' file in the respective directory

You are given the option to select, ignore or omit these files.

Those that you select are entered into the database with names corresponding to the file's prefix (i.e. the part of the filename before "."). They are assigned to the default permissions forum and, if moderation is turned on, flagged to be moderated. If thumbnails have been enabled, these are established automatically if the entry is an image file.

Those file which you 'ignore' are tracked in the file ignore.dat in the relevant directory, and will remain 'ignored' the next time you visit the page. ignore.dat is a plain text file and can be edited as you wish.

The descriptions given to new entries are constructed using the template specified by the LDM->Admin->Setting monitor_template (normally links_scantext) within the style assigned to the category in which the entries are being created. The standard template creates a message of the form 'trawled during scan of $dir', where '$dir' is replaced by the name of the directory in which the file is stored. You may modify this template as desired. Bear in mind that text creation is a once-off process, so if you subsequently change the template or style, earlier texts will not be recreated. The template can include all normal vBulletin constructions, including conditional expressions and variables available at the relevant point in the code.