[mccollin]

OK, another night of work and I almost have my more complicated portal page built with vBindex. I am really learning the power of vB, templates, and this great script.

I have FAQ content on my site that I stored in forums by category. With phpBB, I had written separate scripts for each device and the maintenance was getting to be difficult with simple changes requiring me to replicate it across all the scripts.

Using vBi and some custom tables, queries, and templates... I have managed to make this all run from one script... my home page news, my faqs, everything. You just pass "device=" in the url and you are in business. Because NTLDR has made this such a clean single file script, it was very easy to get it to work.

Here is a current example of these techniques in action. This page shows a subset of the news from the home page, and then organizes FAQs that are stored in multiple forum by category. I two tables... one for the index of what FAQ threads go to what category, and another that stores all the device info... specs, newsforums, faqforums, image location, etc, etc. I look for device= at the beginning of the script.... if it doesn't find it it runs the vbindex as designed. If it does find it, it loads variables for news and a custom block of code (based on news) to organize and display the device specs and faqs.

I still have some more work to do to add the blocks for new, updates, and popular FAQs... but that should be a piece of cake to add add using these techniques. I have a lot of data to migrate from the phpBB tables to the vB tables, so I need to do that before putting this in production for all devices. I've got a production page of for an older device... the Audiovox Thera to show how it looks...

vBindex version of Thera Portal page

Old phpBB version of Thera Portal Page

By the way, is it necessary to include the HASH info in the url when callling a vbindex.php?