Use of prototemplates in addition to FileHippo

[shawn]

It seems to me that there are several common sites that we end up coding templates for, then plugging in various values to feed them. FileHippo handling is great, but the selection is limited and they only handle the 32bit versions of most apps, and that's not working for me. Since we end up creating a different template for each job even tho we are using the same sources. That means we have to update ALL the templates to fix each job that uses a different source when they change something (like the search form or directory structure).

 

I think it would be better to have the ability to create prototemplates and then select them as the basis for our template, without having to actually rebuild the template from scratch each time. This would minimize most of the functional variables and scraping that had to be done on the backend for each of these templates, and really reduce maintenance time.

 

Instead of a toggle between URL and FileHippo, make it a toggle between URL and a drop-down list to select the prototemplate base. FileHippo, MajorGeeks, CNET Downloads...or any other base XML file within a given folder or imported into the database.

[floele]

The problem is, that FileHippo is not just a "base XML file". It's based on a set of functions coded in C#.

 

A feature like the "prototemplates" would be possible to implement though. In this case, all applications based on such a special template would have to be recreated from the template before updating. I believe that we had some discussion on a similar feature before.

[shawn]

This would be so helpful to me - and I would gladly rewrite (and share, of course) all of my templates from the download sites.