Mini Mods - Integrating Living Avatars with vBulletin

For those of you who have installed the Living Avatars mod and have faced the problems I have this tutorial is for you. I have found that although LA works with vBulletin, v1.1x it makes no effort at all to use a point system other than its own (resolved in v2.x) or match the look and feel of your forums. This tutorial will will make the Living Avatars (v1.1x and 2.x) mod fit within the look and feel of your forums and in step 1, you will find how to make LA work with vbCredits.

This is not so much a modification or hack as it is a tutorial.

Requirements:
The Living Avatar mod (found at www.livingavatars.com) (Works with v1.1.x and 2.xx)
1 file edit
2 file uploads
1 template edit

Credits: The Living Avatars mod can be found at www.livingavatars.com and is free for all. I used the
instructions by Gary King entitled "How to create your own vBulletin-powered page!" alongside a
script at the Dynamic Drive site to make this work. Thanks goes to Digital Jedi for sending me the links for this.
------------------------------
NOTES:
This document assumes that you have installed the "Living Avatars" mod. If you have not, please go to www.livingavatars.com, download it and get it running on your site. Once that is done, go to Step 1 in this document.

Note: If you are installing v2.x of Living Avatars, skip step 1 of these instructions

Demo - You will need an account to see it. If you don't want to register, just look at the screencap attached to this post.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
Step 1: Go to this post at www.living avatars.com and follow the instructions to merge LA with the vbCredits mod.

Step 2: Make a new template named "LivingAvatars" and put the contents of the
"LivingAvatars-template.txt" file in it.

Step 3: Edit the included "cpnav_livingavatars.xml" file to refer to your forum
directory. Currently, it is set to "/forums/".

Step 4: Upload the "LivingAvatars_vb.php" file to your forum root folder.

Step 5: Upload the "cpnav_livingavatars.xml" file to your "/forum root/includes/xml" folder.

Step 6: Modify the "modifyavatar" template
Look for 2 references to

living_avatars/index.php

and replace it with

LivingAvatars_vb.php

That's it

Note: The Living Avatars mod can be found at livingavatars.com or in this post at vbulletin.org. Thanks goes to Ideal Web Tech for pointing this out.

Note: This works with vBulletin 3.8 as well.

[PGAmerica]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

Shame living avatars site, says registration is now disabled

I posted a message on their site about this. I will keep you up to date with their responses

[TimberFloorAu]

Originally Posted by PGAmerica

I posted a message on their site about this. I will keep you up to date with their responses

Cheers mate :up:

[dreads]

very nice i will isntall this tommorw :P

[Captain Tycoon]

Installed and Marked! I think Ziad has stopped giving support for this mod and stopped the development since there are no glitches/bugs with it. I really hope he comes back to add new features

[Ideal Web Tech]

BTW for everybody who wants the mod but cant get it because the registration is disabled the mod has been maintained on here as well as the authors site.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=146200

That will get you the exact same version you will get from their site.

Enjoy

[PGAmerica]

Originally Posted by Ideal Web Tech

BTW for everybody who wants the mod but cant get it because the registration is disabled the mod has been maintained on here as well as the authors site.

Thanks for this info. I have updated the first post to state this as well.

[Ideal Web Tech]

Originally Posted by PGAmerica

Thanks for this info. I have updated the first post to state this as well.

Your welcome.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by PGAmerica

Thanks goes to Digital Jedi for sending me the links for this.

No problem. I never thought of releasing this as a mod.

I'm interested in why you call your page LivingAvatars_vb.php. I went with livingavatars.php. Of course, I did mine just a hair different then you did, I believe. I haven't looked it over completely.

Here's another screen shot if people are interested in how smoothly you can make the skin integration. I have a peculiar skin. Click to enlarge:

[PGAmerica]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

No problem. I never thought of releasing this as a mod.

As I said earlier, I consider this more of a tutorial than a mod.

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

I'm interested in why you call your page LivingAvatars_vb.php. I went with livingavatars.php.

Donno, just the name I chose.

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Of course, I did mine just a hair different then you did, I believe. I haven't looked it over completely.

I curious. What did you do that was different? It looks the same in your screencap. Except that you left the LA links.

[Digital Jedi]

I only had a chance to look it over briefly (out of town at the moment), but I didn't make any changes to my XML file. I made a handful of changes to a couple of the Living Avatars PHP files. I think it was livingavatars/index.php and one other. Can't check because I'm on a hotel computer, but it was just a few changes to where the internal links went to. I put target="_top" in a few and replaced one of the images.