Creating a sidebar on one page

[Hell Bomb]

Hey everyone, im trying to make a page like https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/info.php?do=staff
with the sidebar on just that one page does anyone know how to do this? i have been working at it for about 1.5 hours and not gotten far, it keeps being unaligned.

[kh99]

How about something like:

<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="180">
(all the stuff for the left column)
</td>
<td>
(all the stuff to the right)
</td>
</tr>
</table>

(of course you can adjust "180" to be whatever works).

[Hell Bomb]

*Edit* Took about 5 hours but i finally got all the pages working! many thanks to people around vBulletin.org they helped me a lot :)

[kh99]

Edit: Regarding my post above - the "100%" should go on the table tag, not the second td tag (I changed the code in the above post). Sorry.

[Hell Bomb]

Sorry, that's my fault. I could swear that's how I did it before, but I guess if you say "100%" it takes up as much space as it can even if the other cell has a pixel width. I'm going to look up how I did that...



Yeah, OK - the "100%" should go on the table tag, not the second td tag (I changed the code in the above post).

Sorry again.

actually that didn't work either. I tried that about 10 minutes in. If you are interested on exactly how i did this i can PM you a link to how i did it. I will be releasing it in a mod soon enough for people who are interested in doing something similar. IT allows people to add a side bar to any single page and even recreate an exact look alike of the link i posted in my first post if they wanted to. Either way its pretty nice :)

[kh99]

Good job, I'll look at your mod when you release it.

actually that didn't work either. ...

Well, I got that off a page that has a side bar like that. But of course there are other ways to do it, and there are style vars to add as well, so I'm sure your mod will be useful to people.

ETA: OK, I had "180px" for the width in the above code, so maybe what I posted didn't work after all.

[doob]

I'm researching how what template or php document to edit to add a right side sidebar to www.travelers411.com/forums/

I want to add a 220px wide column that I'll populate with php includes for banners and other items.

I'm not looking for an installer or mod, I'd like to hand code this functionality myself.

Any insights appreciated.

[kh99]

Maybe since you asked Hellbomb will share his code with us.

In any case, basically you can find the part in the template that displays the stuff you want to be on the *left* side, then add something like this:

<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td>
(existing stuff you want in the left column)
</td>
<td width="220">
(stuff for the right column)
</td>
</tr>
</table>

(actually, now that I look at the code in post #2 again, I had "px" after the 180 (which I'm now going to remove) so maybe it didn't work after all).

There are style vars you can add to put in the spacing and such that is set in the style editor, you can probably find an existing table and see how it's done.

As far as which template to edit, I think it might be FORUMHOME but I'm not sure. You can go to VBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Add Template Name in HTML Comments and set it to "yes" temporarily, then look at the page source and there will be comments telling you which template the output comes from.

Anyway, I hope my answer won't stop Hellbomb from posting his solution.

[doob]

That basically makes sense. I had planned on integrating it differently though.

I'd like to use divs rather than tables. I'm not a big fan on the old-school use of tables and have pretty much abandoned them.

I'd like to do the following, and am not sure if I'm just totally on the wrong track as far as programming for VB or if I'm making a small syntax error...

1) add a global_start plugin that reads something like: ob_start();
include('../nav/sidebar/includes/forumsGeneric.php');
$include_daSidebarRight = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

1a) the forumsGeneric.php page would have its own css to control the placement of the content: i.e. it would float:right; width: 220px; etc... That page pretty much just consists of a <div> instead of a table, but I can then edit it seperately from FORUMHOME etc.

2) Then if I undestand, I should be able to just drop in a single variable into the relavant template to get my new <div> in there. That is what I did to add a custom $navbar and $footer. So I think I should be able to call my sidebar plugin $sidebarRight and then just drop that variable in at the end of the page and see my sidebar show up. However, that's not working, so again, if anyone can nudge me in the right direction that'd be great.

Thanks again.

--------------- Added 1260159337 at 1260159337 ---------------

Ok. I was able to edit the FORUMHOME template and basically break out that page in the same way I break out the non-forums portion of the site into divs controlled by css.

When I had created plugins for header and footer info becuase I did not have a sidebar I didn't put them in divs becuase I didn't need them to float.

Adding a floating sidebar meant the rest of the page got messed up. And the reason it was getting messed up is becuase I hadn't put the plugin header/footer into a div becuase I didn't originally need too.

So, it was as simple as wrapping the $header $sidebar $footer variables in <div></div> tags with a class applied.

Bam! Homegrown sidebar action! Woop woop!
-D

ps. right now the site is not using the template that I got the sidebar working in. I should have the new template take over sometime early this week if all goes according to plan.

Now I just need to figure out how to get everyone on to the new template without screwing anything up.

[s-p0k]

I Would Like To Do This As Will......