My company used download monitor in our client sites for years and now we are being forced to move over to download manager. It’s a great plugin so far but there are some things that download monitor had that I can’t seem to find in download manager pro.
The shortcode to output files (“packages” in dmpro) always outputs a pagination at the end of each category output. That is fine if you want to create a page for your categories but we tend to output download category lists in various places in our site design. In particular, many of our clients have an “applications” page where they want multiple lists of download files. So, we have multiple categories that each have a bunch of files. Then we create one application page where we have many shortcode blocks, one for each of the categories we want to output. However, now each block of categories has “pagination” code under it. Since there is no way to turn off pagination we have to set the output of each shortcode to about 1000 or something to ensure that all of the files will output and not paginate. In download monitor the shortcode to list files in a shortcode simply outputted the files from that category… it didn’t also output pagination nor did it want to output the search feature. Now, we can turn off the category search feature but it seems to turn it off everywhere. That should really be done via the shortcode. Or have two kinds of shortcode, one like it currently is and then one simpler shortcode that just outputs whatever files are in a particular category.
I think dmpro has great potential to be even better than download monitor ever was but the shortcodes don’t seem to be as user friendly yet. Plus, there is no way as far as I can tell to “wrap” the output the way you could with download monitor (ie. wrap the list in a tag or a tag for each row if you were doing a table. I tried making a table in the custom templates in dmpro and the shortcode seemed to strip away the table formatting and break the page layout. Divs work fine but what if we want tables? Tables are great for outputting data like this).
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