Nexia's Forum Sidebar Everywhere
 

Will add the forumhome sidebar everywhere logically possible to show it, with choices of locations.

First Screenshots show how it is "before/after" on the calendar page, doing some esthetical changes... some templates are less obvious!

Third screeny is about the settings you can change to your wills.

I take requests if you want other templates to be available...

Actual Pages where the sidebar can be activated on release date, Mar 21th, 2012:

Forumhome (can even be deactivate and show sidebar elsewhere)
Main Albums Pages
Announcements
Calendar
FAQ
Forum Display
Main Groups Pages
Member List
Who's Online
Show Thread
Main Blog Pages

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# How To use Nexia's Forum Sidebar Everywhere:


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# Simple Installation:

1- upload via ftp the content of the /UPLOAD_THIS/ folder in your forum's base directory.

2- Import the Product file included in the /IMPORT_THIS/ folder.

3- AdminCP >> Settings >> Options >> Forum Sidebar and Block Options

Follow that path and change the list of pages you want the sidebar to show up.


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# Customization:

If you have customized templates on the pages affected by this engine, you will need to edit it's related template to make it fit your custom design. To do so, it's simple... to edit our version of SHOWTHREAD, find SHOWTHREAD_SIDEBAR and edit it accordingly.
*(you can also hire nexialys to do the job!)


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# What to Know:

This tool originally replace the pages you browse by pages that contain the sidebar you already have on Forum Home.

How it work is simple. Each page you see on your browser is made from a "template" containing the proper codes to display each elements you see in the page. For the default vBulletin, only the "Forum Home" page contain the codes to display a sidebar. But maybe you would like to see that sidebar in other pages where it would help the navigation of the visitors ?!

That's what this tool intend to do... add the sidebar in precise pages that deserve to. In the "Forum Sidebar and Block Options" page, you can now select what page will show the sidebar...

To make it more even, the FORUMHOME template was updated as well to look like all the others... as the sidebar is supposed to be similar everywhere.


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# Why not adding everything via plugin instead of switching templates?:

When we add that kind of content via plugin, we face the possibility to have a template that is incompatible with the hooks we need, or a style that we can not trust because written poorly.

We switch templates so your designer can edit the default templates we provide and make them better if necessary. It is tangible content, it requires less server process, and you can customize it for each style you have... the other technique does not comply with that option.

EDIT: update on april 10th, now deactivate automatically for Mobile styles... *(as requested hundreds of times! :D )
EDIT: update on april 11th, edited the product file to fit forumhome for mobiles, sorry!

EDIT: august 9th, 2012: version 4.2 is now supported - memberlist and other pages are now showing proper content... sorry for the late, summer vacations with 7 kids is a bit complicated to deal with!

I'm taking request for pages you want to see with the sidebar...

already in the work for version 1.0.1:

- ... some other internal pages inside vBulletin
- vBExperience
- vbPlaza
- vB Project Tools
- v3 arcade

there will be a plugin inside this system to be able to add any page of coders choice when they want to add this feature to their product/hack...

Tagged, I'll keep an eye on this one.

Tried it on our forum got this error

Had to uninstall it to remove the error from our forums header.

Thanks... you can install again... this error was related to a last-addition code that i did not test, just to be stupid, was missing a " ) "...

i also added a security fix to avoid code injection and missing array in verification code.

also added default values to the plugin or it would display nothing nowhere...

What an interesting idea.
I am keeping my eye on this one.

Flawless. Thank you :)

On me localhost although that's still a install, marked as so :p.

Edit: Yes this does eliminate the styling issues I've encountered in the past... have you thought about the CMS or Blogs yet? It can be done but the entire <div> class must be replicated and re-used i.e. sidebar is stacked etc because of how they utilize some default sidebar code in those as it was never intended to be used in conjunction with.

sure, that is the next step... i've done it already, but did not added to the release. :)

they are not complicated to deal with, when you know what is CSS... rofl