WebTemplates v.0.1 (Old Version)
 

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Attention: This version of webtemplates is obsolete since new version (2.xx) is released as of 30.June.2003.

If you are new user, please visit new hack's thread and install that one, not this version.

This thread is active for discussing migration issues and will be closed in the future.
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Introduction:
Basically this hack allows you create vbulletin powered non-vb pages within vb admin CP and administer them just like vb templates.

Your "webtemplates" reside inside MYSQL and have the same structure as regular vbulletin templates and you edit/modify/delete them inside your Admin CP. You can create as many as you like and display them like:
http://yoursite URL/yourboard URL/show.php?pg=YOUR_WEBTEMPLATE_NAME.

Features of Your WebTemplates:
* You can easily edit/update your non-vb pages from your vb control panel just like vb templates. No need to FTP or smt.
* Simply backup your vbulletin and your entire site (including your webtemplates) is backed up too.
* You can use some vbulletin variables in your non-vb pages, so eg. address your members with their member names in your entire site.
* Your entire web site can mimic your forum's visual interface. All your fonts/colors etc. are kept in your non-vb. pages too. Besides users' style sets apply for your web templates either. So for instance if you have 2 styles, every user will see your webtemplates in the style and colors they are using in the board.
* This hack allows you to specify usergroups/usernames which can or cannot see the page you designed. So your non-vb pages can inherit vb. access permissions. Every webtemplate can have different display permissions for different users/usergroups.
* You can have counters in your pages and show/trace page visits individually for all your pages. Every webtemplate has its own counter.
* You can have "last visitor's name and visit time" in all your pages.
* You can insert fixed header/footer for all your pages.
* The "conditionals" you can set, allow you to design advanced and dynamic web pages, which change themselves according to the conditions you set. For example you can set different texts/page designs IN THE SAME PAGE for different users and every user will only see the text that is addressed to him.

Webtemplates are very easy to create. Just copy paste the HTML code of your page into the webtemplate box, give it a name, click submit and voila, your webtemplate is up and running! By using this method, you can convert your existing non-vb pages into webtemplates with ease too. It is just a matter of copy/paste its HMTML code. Installation of the hack is easy too and the hack will work any version of vbulletin I know.

For Advanced Users: If you want your webtemplates to get data from your database and display it, you have an advanced feature named "webqueries". WebQueries feature allows you to run SQL queries in your MYSQL database and automatically create sorted tables for you which you can add in any WebTemplates. So your non-vb pages can be dynamic and you can have any kind of SQL results (related with vb or not) in any page you want. Webqueries are optional to use and appeals to people with basic SQL knowledge. You can still create webtemplates very easily without using webqueries if you don't know SQL or don't need to query your database in your webtemplate. If you want to play with webqueries, please read and follow instructions CAREFULLY. This hack gives you advanced tools to create powerful and dynamic web pages, so give yourself sometime and learn how to create these pages. I wrote help pages which you can find in your webtemplates section after installation, so please read them carefully and examine sample page's code before pelting me with questions! :)

If you installed this hack, share your webquery samples in this thread


Fixes and Add-ons:
* If you have than 1 MYSQL databases, webquery section might not work properly. If you encounter any problems related to that issue, apply the small fix in this post.[/COLOR]
* If you want to display your webtemplates in who is online, apply this small hack .
Also there is a small bug with "conditionals" feature of the hack, if you use more than 1 conditional in 1 webtemplate. I guess very few people use this feature but anyway I fixed it in the new release that is in progress..
* If you want your webtemplates search engine friendly and indexed in google or other search engines, read this tip by Piper.

Current version (BETA v.0.1) is NOT actually a beta anymore, it's proven to be working very well in many people's boards and is stable.

I plan to develop this hack. However to enhance it more, I need to change its algortihm which requires rewriting and I wait for VB3 so that the hack will will be competible with VB3 too. That's why development is pending at the moment.


If you install the hack please click install, thank you.

Regards,
Logician //=^))

Some screenshots:
Please notice that the first two screenshots belongs to same non-vb web page (=webtemplate).

The page look different because screenshots have been taken from different users (TestUser1 and TestUser2) views. This clearly demonstrates the dynamic structure of webtemplates created with this hack.
http://www.turkhukuksitesi.com/images/testuser1_.jpg
http://www.turkhukuksitesi.com/images/testuser2_.jpg

And a screenshot from Control Panel:
http://www.turkhukuksitesi.com/images/admincp_.jpg

Regards,
Logician

Looks really good... I'm going to test it later, when I get to home.

I haven't looked at it yet, but it seems quite incredible... What a job you've done!

Holy poop :)... This is great. *clicks install*

ok.. I am still not to sure what this does that I cant do already with vb or the fewa hacks already made on thie forum.... but it looks good none the less. nice job :)

I'm having a little trouble following it's use, but it looks interesting. :)

I'm installing this on my test forums, incredible!

Well, the answer is lots of things pal. ;) This hack allows you to create and administer your site's non-vb web pages inside your vb control panel.

These pages will inherit your forum's user access permissions. So you can create web pages which can be accessible to certain usergroups and unaccessible for other groups. You can even permit or ban the pages according to forum user names, so your pages can be visible/invisible for a specific user(s).

Your pages will inherit styles and forum's visual design too. Thus every user will be able to monitor your web pages in their own style sets they set in their user cp.

Besides these web pages you created will be totally dynamic. For example you can create a web page which will list a user's last 10 recent threads and every user visited this page will see his last 10 threads.

You can even set specific conditions for your web pages. You can order your web page to load in a different way/post any text/have a different design if the page's visitor is X or if his age is under 18. Just use your imagination, any condition you can think of!

This hack is not a bulletin board system. It's a web site administration system which depends on your vbulletin board. :)

Hope this helps..

Regards,

Please let me know, how the installation went.. Thank you..

MY GOD...you can have my first born child.

This is amazing!!!!!!

I have a feeling that this is going to explode.

Mike

:surprised: I gotta test this one out...

Oh WOW! I didn't think this was a big deal until I saw your reply to neo. Very nice. Great Job. I will try to install this soon. Now I am going to think about something to do with it as soon as I can. :)

I installed it, its very cool, but a downside it creates FAR too many calls to show.php in my opinion. This hack is great for the site that is 100% its fourms, you can't really build an entire site around this hack, but easily create a bunch of great little pages. Good hack man! 5 Stars!

Ok... WONDERFUL sounding... but what are the down falls... their is always down falls?

Oooh man, did he beat Nakkid to the release? =| I recall nakkid working on somethin similiar to this, vBHome I believe.

But nice job nonetheless :) Whatever benefits the community.

Ok it seems that many people got the pros so lets discuss the cons, shall we?

When you create a page (ie webtemplate) with this hack, it will reside in your MYSQL database. This means that everytime this page is called by your users your site have to relate with MYSQL which will create a overhead (CPU usage) compared to static HTML pages.

If you want to have dynamic (ie changing for every user) pages then you have to bear this overhead because server has to interrelate with something to get and process data to create a dynamic page. This can be SQL DB, another file on the server etc. and in our hack that is mySQL.

If you have a informative static page, there is no need to convert it to a webtemplate. It will be safe and reduce the load in your server if you leave it as a HTML page. However if you need to create dynamic pages which derive their strength from your forum db, then this hack gives you the tools you need.

Well, lets see how much overhead it requires:

First go check your forum's main page's overhead:
call this link (YOUR FORUM URL)/index.php?explain=1

Go at the end of the page and see how many queries did your forum's main page requires while loading.In my forum it's 20 which is a quite reasonable number (at least for vb). (FYI for showthread.php this number is much higher)

Now do the same thing for my hack: (after installation of course!) :)
Call this link (YOUR FORUM URL)/show.php?pg=whoareyou&explain=1

You'll see that while loading the page, server will connect the database only for 10-14 times which is 1/2 of your forum's main page overhead. I think this is quite reasonable. Moreover if you disable page visit ($count variable), reduce the webqueries in your webtemplate you'll lower this number. So on the average a web template with one Webquery in it will only connect to your MYSQL 10-12 times and that is bearable considering the fact that you get a powerful and nice dynamic (fully integrated with your vb) page in return.

I hope this clarifys this hack's performance issues..

Regards,
Logician

I know many people are interested in the hack itself and its features but honestly my primary concern at the moment is how it's working in different user's forums. Hack is BETA so I need any feedbacks about installation and working issues.

So guys if you install this hack, please report how it is doing in your server? Any installation problems? Does sample page (whoareyou) loads as it should be? Do access permissions working ok (eg. page should only allow admin and forum members to load it, guests for example should get "not allowed" remark). Do web queries in that page work? Do you get your last 10 threads and personal calender events?

I appreciate any feedback. Thank you..

Regards,
Logician

Hey there,
Well it's a bit confusing, I agree :knockedout:

Let me give an example of its usage from my own site:

I administer a non-commercial law site which is dedicated and addressed to professional law men. As you can guess our board (vb) has a crucial effect in my web site because it maintains a very efficient communication among law professionals.

In my forum we also have a "newbie legal questions" forum area which stands for non-lawmen visitors' legal questions. We also have a few informative web pages (outside the board) in our site for these non-lawmen visitors.

After installing my board, I decided to include dynamic content to these web pages which are outside the board. I wanted to compile last 10 answered threads from "newbie questions" area and list them in the web page. This would be nice because this web page would only be read by visitors who are not lawmen and they would be highly interested with the answered questions from this specific forum area and I would get them to this area and my board from this web page.

I first planned to create this page with PHP and but then I noticed that I want to have many dynamic pages like this and it would be arduous to code many PHP scripts individually for every page and more arduous to maintain them in the future.

So this hack was born. Instead of coding many PHP scripts all of which in common compile data from vb with SQL queries (=WebQueries), have the same visual design, headers/footers etc., I wrote this hack that gives me the ground to easily administer these pages. (=webtemplates).

Now whenever I need a web page that requires dynamic content and interaction with vbulletin data, I can create a webtemplate/webquery and although this page is a standart HTML page outside the board, I can have any kind of data from vbulletin in this page. Besides visual design of this page is easier any more, because it's automatically handled by the script according to my vbulletin's styles and colors. If I want I can permit/ban access to this page for certain users or usergroups either. I can even insert hidden personal notes for certain users or usergoups inside this page.

So dont think this hack something that extends vbulletin board features. It extends your non-vb web page features and integrates them with your vbulletin board.

I hope this practical usage of this hack can shed a light about its use and features.

Regards,
Logician

Very impressive, and a very good idea. It's a pity my sites will be too complex for this to be useful in my particular case, but I can see this becoming one very very popular hack in time, as the possibilities are seemingly endless, and the usefulness is very high! :):up:

Great hack/addition. Well done

this is basically what i did with my site. i respect that you put a nice face to it, but 'inheriting permission' is no harder than putting a include("./forums/global.php") in your source. should be helpful to quite a few people who don't want the bells and whistles of vbportal, but still maintain integration with vb.

Guys,

If you installed this hack, share your webqueries in this thread

To start the sharing and demonstrate what can be done with this hack, I posted a WebQuery+WebTemplate sample which will give you a page you can read last XX member private messages in your board. Find it there..

Regards,

Hi, Logician...

Anyway, sounds like an interesting hack. The only question that I have is this.

Why should I use your hack instead of doing something like the following:

that is a very basic custom page that calls vBulletin templates, plus a custom template (called: home). It doesn't have any layout or anything, and I haven't done that much, but it is just like any of vBulletin's normal pages (just no current 'functionality' though it is easy to add, just displays information depending on vBulletin cookies)?

to see the above page in action go to http://www.teenssucceed.com/home.php

That is very easy to do with some custom templates and a basic understanding of how a vBulletin page works (the basic template outputs, etc.)

Why is your hack any better then doing it as above?

Oh, the one custom template used in the basic example above contains the following:

James

*throws away current project*

crap this is awesome! even better than what I was going to do! :D

Hey James,

* Your sample templates lack the ability to be administered inside vb cp.
* Your sample lacks the ability to have "conditionals", that is simple "if" clauses you can set in your templates without PHP knowledge.
* Your sample lacks the feature to do SQL queries in your db and create automatic tables in HTML, without PHP and even SQL knowledge.
* Your sample requires PHP coding for every template you need to design, especially if you need to ban the template to your users user1 and user2 only or you need to put a hidden text which will be shown to certain users.

What my hack does can be done by coding individiual PHP pages. This hack is no miracle and I didnt say that you cant have the same effects/pages by programming your own PHP scripts. Please read my answer to TWTCommish: This hack gives you to ground to create MANY dynamic pages easily without arduous job of coding, besides you can even have dynamic pages/queries even if you dont know PHP or SQL.

I created this hack for my own site. I could have the same dynamic pages by programming individual PHP scripts but I found it more easy to have a "system" that gives you the ground to easily control these pages without coding them individually. I added "WebQuery" feature to have db Query results easily. Even a guy with 0 knowledge of PHP and SQL can have dynamic pages with this hack by just inserting other's WebQuery's from vb cp.

If you are a PHP/HTML/SQL Wiz and commit time to code your own scripts, then you need neither my hack, nor ANY hacks in this site. You dont even need this site itself! You can create ALL the hacks in this site, by coding your own scripts or hacks. You can ask all hack writers: "I can do this by this PHP code too and why is yours better than mine?" and well, of course you can, you are also a programmer and as you may very well know, same effects can be achieved by different programs. :cool: So your question is unanswered, not only for my hack, but all these hacks in this site.

Regards,

Okay, got ya...I think I understand your hack now...thanks for taking the time to help me out :)

James

P.S. I wish I was a 'programmer' but I am not, I have just spent some time getting to understand the vBulletin template system and am able to call and direct pretty well.

Great hack so far, and room for more potential (It works by the way with no problems of installaiton and Im using it in conjuction with vbportal)

I was wondering if it could be possible to add to it.

I was wondering if it would be possible to change the query for the last 10 and instead of pulling the last 10 threads he/she has posted to the forum, pull only "all" threads he/she has posted to a private forum?

Edit:

Figured out how to do the post all threads (take off limit 10)
But how do I make the query only look at the private forum that he/she only has acces to? And apply to to every usergroup? I have all my users in usergroups (so no one under registered or groupid 2

I think i have the idea to make similar "whoareyou" templates for each usergroup I have so they would only have access to it. Would that be wise to do?

Another q:

Is it possible that instead of taking the user to the actual forum itself to view the thread, but to pull the contents of the thread and have them be viewed in a "threaded" format?

Is this possible?

Sure you can! This is what this hack is for: You can have ANY SQL queries in your database and you can make it listed in any Webtemplate you created.

So all you have to do is to add a new "WebQuery" that does the SQL query you need, then attach this webquery to any webtemplates to automatically list it in your page.

One downside: At the moment this hack does not list sql select results in pages in which you click and get the page 2, 3, etc..So you have 2 options: You can query ALL threads and if the query returns say 700 results, all will be listed in one page! Or you can limit your query with SQL command LIMIT then whatever numbers your user has, only your limited number of results will return.

Anyway if you have problems in designing your Webquery, ask me here and I can help you with the query.

I had already installed WebTemplates in a test board a few weeks ago. Now I tried to install it on my main board, with no success. I did and re-did everything that is described on the installation instructions, but nothing seems to work:

When I go to
http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/s...p?pg=whoareyou

I get a "mySQL error:No Database Selected"

When I go to
http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/s...ebtemplatehelp

I get the "The page you requested does not exist!" error message.

Installation went fine and I'm not sure why this is happening. I'd really appreciate your support.

Thanks,
Paulo

Please check the screenshot attached..I got this screen when I tried to call the url you referred. Dont you get this screen?

This screen indicates that hack has been installed successfuly and it's working. If you get the error after you login, this is very likely because there is something wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access (not the hack itself).

If so please double check there is nothing wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access. Try this text to replace your "whoareyou" webtemplate:
-- cut--
[cantsee]everybody[/cantsee][cansee]1 2 TestUser2 6 testuser1[/cansee]
[options]templatequeryon[/options]
{htmldoctype}
<html>
<head>
<title>$bbtitle</title>
<p align="left">$headinclude </head> <body> $header <br><p>

<p align="left"> <normal>TEST PAGE LOADED SUCCESSFULLY!</normal></p>
$footer
-- cut --
Login with the user userid 1 and lets see if it works now..

great hack I've been looking for something like this with out having to use a vbportal, I'm prob going to try and content most of my site over to this hack. (http://www.orbsydia.com) as I've been wanting to convert my site to php anyway, this will really speed things up. :)

When it's all done let me know where to send a donation ;) or two... and where to download your final after beta ;)

Khaybel I'll be much more delighted if you return me feedback about the hack, instead of a sending a donation :)

I understand people posting about their problems but I would like to hear "hey I installed it and it works without any problems" messages, especially considering the fact that this is beta. Same applies for number of people who installed this hack, which certainly does not help motivating me improving the hack more as I mentioned in the other thread.

However if you are determined to spend a few bucks, just donate to a charity of any kind. That will sure make me happy! :cool:

Thanks for the nice comments..

Regards,
Logician

I just finished installing the hack, it went in smoothly, I'm sure if it was on a php version of the forums it would be perfect for the install, although I use the php3 versions of the forums, so had to make a few name changes from php to php3, but nothing major.

I used ultra edit to do a mass fine and replace for your php to php3 extensions.

Small update: As of june 1st/2002
Just got new rack server, so reinstalling this hack with 226, will post new layout link with script in action when I have it up, thank you for all your hard work.

Hi Logician,

Thanks for your answer and sorry I took I while to write back. Real life has been a bit hectic. I just reinstalled vB 2.2.5 just to be sure none of the hacks I had installed was interfering with WebTemplates.

Anyway, I reinstalled the hack and almost everything works fine now:

The template webtemplate_help is showing up perfectly. However, whoareyou still gives me a "mySQL error:No Database Selected" error. I tried to create a new template, identical to whoareyou, called test, and played with it for a while.

I found out that the line

[options]templatequeryon[/options]

Is what messes things up. If I remove that line, as I did in the template "test" (check it out, I changed it also to [cansee]everyone[/cantsee], so you should be able to: http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/show.php?pg=test), things show up, although the queries don't work (of course).

I'd really appreciate your input on this. I'm planning on using WebTemplates to run my entire site, along with vbIndex and/or vbHome (Lite).

Again, many thanks for your help and congratulations on creating one of the best hacks I've ever seen!

Shine on,
Paulo

Can you put the line back in the template. I want to see the error message. And needless to say: Your webqueries (that is in the webtempate) exists in your database right? If webtemplate tries to process an webtemplate which exists in the webtemplate but does not exist in your database (ie vb cp), this error can occur. So please double check you have existing (at least default) webqueries in your admin cp. (via modify webquery). If I'm not wrong you should have

_last_10_threads [edit] [remove]
Gets user's last 10 threads from forum database
_privateevents [edit] [remove]
Gets user's recent private calender event list

webqueries by default. Check their content seems intact too..For example as for _privateevents :

Query is:

SELECT eventid, eventdate, subject FROM calendar_events WHERE userid="$user_userid" AND public="0" ORDER BY eventdate ASC

Table Row is:
<li><normalfont><a href="$bburl/calendar.php?s=&action=getinfo&eventid=??eventid?? ">??subject??</a></normalfont> <smallfont>(??eventdate??)</smallfont></li>

Does they look good?

Sure, the line is up again in the template (http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/show.php?pg=test), which looks exactly like the whoareyou template, except that everyone could technically see it.

I still get a blank page with only "mySQL error:No Database Selected" on it.

I also double-checked the default webqueries and they seem ok, just like you said.

I'm really clueless about this. The weird thing is that the first time I installed WebTemplates, just after installing vB for the first time and testing it for a while, it seemed to work fine...

Thanks anyway for your help and support!
Paulo

piper, it seems that something is wrong with "webtemplatequery" table. The installation may not be successfully completed for some reason or the table may become corrupted later. So let's check this:

First get this script, edit the first few lines and upload it to your server: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...threadid=38262 (If you dont have any tool to run SQL queries). Then run the script and run this query:

select id,name,query,noresulttext,tablerow from webtemplatequery order by id;

Tell me what it returns back, if any..If it returns that table is corrupted, apply this command:

REPAIR TABLE webtemplatequery;

If it says table does not exist, run installation script one more time..

Logician, here's a screenshot of what came up after I installed logician_query.php and ran that query.

I also did repair the table, although it didn't seem to be corrupted, but it didn't do any good, I still get that error.

Thanks a lot for your support, and sorry to be bugging you with this... :)

Paulo

Hey everybody,

Good news: I am planning to work more on WebTemplates hack and release a new (non-BETA) version with improvements. If you are using the hack, I want to hear your requests about the hack. I cant promise I can meet all requests but they are welcomed.

What I've already planed is:

* Small bug fix that gave The Piper some bad time. If you have more than 1 databases in your server, hack refuses to work with WebQueries. This will be fixed.

* WebTemplate visits will be nicely displayed in Who is Online like:
"UserX viewing WebTemplate: XXXX".

* Date fields returned from WebQueries will be formatted according to visitor's time settings. So you can display them in your webtemplates too..

* Texts in board messages, private messages and calender events will be parsed properly. So all smilies//bb code etc, will be displayed as your board displays them and you can use them in your webtemplates too..

If you have any other ideas, feature requests, feel free to share, thank you..

BTW. if you use this hack and didnt click install yet, please do! I really want to know how many people use this hack. This helps a lot to me to decide if I'll work on this hack more and improve it..

Regards,
Logician