Advanced Templates: Dynamic Templates Changing according to different conditions

This hack allows you to design dynamic vb templates which change themselves according to different conditions. Thus you can customize your board very powerfully with "intelligent/interactive" templates. It uses the same "conditional concept" just like my Webtemplates and Dynamic Forum Announcements Hack. With conditionals you can program your templates to:

• be displayed differently to different users.
• hide/display some part/texts/html codes/even the entire template for some users
• include extra text/HTML codes/secret messages inside which will be displayed if page visitor matches your pre-configured criterias
• Have multi-templates inside 1 template and each of them will be parsed and displayed only if their set condition applies.

You can program your templates according to many different criteria, such as:

• user's userid
• user's usergroup
• user's profile fields' input
• user's post number
• user's last visit time
• user's seniority (register date)
• today's date, day, month, week, year, hour, second, if today is user's birthday
• user's is visibility status
• style id user's using
• user's cookie status
• user's time settings
• (in forumdisplay templates) forum id
• (in showthread templates) thread id
• etc.

Some practical examples about what you can do with this hack:

• You can have different postbit templates for different users/usergroups.
• Display your board differently to the user if it's his birthday, if he is X, if he age <Y, if he didnt visit your board since Z etc.
• Display Admin Only Profile fields/or any profile fields in postbit if X condition applies
• You can hide Admin only links in your templates such as "Show IP".
• Disable Email/Pm User links in postbit or userprofile screen if reader is from usergroup X etc.
• Send different email text to different users according to different criteria. Add hidden email texts if X condition applies
• Hide "register" link if user is not a guest, add access to pm if user is not a guest
• Ban some templates if X condition applies such as dont display profile screens if user's X profile field = Y
• Disable some forums if today is X day or hour is Y
• Dont display thread view/user count/last reply date if user's usergroup is X
• Hide threads according to different criteria in showthread templates

Well there are literally millions of possibilities you can apply, so please use your imagination for more examples..

The Hack's Features:

• Installation is VERY easy: Actually 2 steps in 1 file will take less than 1 minute..You will be surprised how such a small modification will make such a big difference in your board.
• It's compatible with ALL vb versions I know
• The hack covers all the templates in your database: ie. custom templates, ALL vbulletin templates including even emails and error messages etc.
• It's fully compatible with all your installed hacks and their custom templates too.
• It makes many small hacks obsolete because you can now modify your templates to achieve the same result instead of hacking your board (=changing .php files)

Vbulletin v.3 has been announced to have "conditional" concept in templates, however my hack wasn't inspired by it at all, because I'm using the conditionals in my Webtemplates hack since March 2002 so in fact vb developers might be inspired by me. My Dynamic Forum Announcements hack uses the same concept for forum home announcements too.. (Wait for my other hacks depending on conditionals cause I really like them, they are really powerful and customizable)

Performance Issues
The hack does NOT add any MYSQL connections. It just process your already retrieved templates in a function to parse the hack conditionals. Thus the performance is IMO quite bearable. However please notice that if a template has a conditional in it, the hack have to parse it before displaying it and technically this parsing is done with PHP's preg_match command which is known as a powerful but slow command. So does it cause any performance problems? In most cases no. But if the conditionals are applied in a very frequently used and/or long template and/or you used too many conditionals in one template AND your traffic or server load is high, this MAY increase your PHP processing time whenever this template is displayed as the hack has to deal with the conditionals everytime this template is called. I suggest applying Teck's Microstat's hack and observe the PHP running time with that hack after you applied a conditional especially in a frequently used template (eg. postbit). If it slows down the display, simply reduce your conditional count in that template or delete the conditional or remove the hack altogether. Personally I dont have any performance problems in my own board related to this hack but just wanted to give my 2 cents anyway especially for high-traffic boards..

If you liked the hack (I guess you will), I strongly suggest checking out my Webtemplates hack which provides exactly the same feature for your NON-VB pages.

Also please click INSTALL if you use the hack, thank you..

09.Sep.2002 Bug Fix: If you installed the hack before 09.Sep.2002 please download the instructions again and reapply step 2, since I made an update for a small bug fix. There was a variable name collision which causes a problem with email validation screen which uses the same variable so I changed my variable's name. If you are downloading the hack now, go ahead.. The code you download is already fixed..
07.Oct.2002 UPDATE: I updated the hack code, so that people who have enabled template debugging in their Admin CP/vb Settings can also use the hack. Also small modification applied to increase template parsing time. If you installed the hack before my update, you may choose to reinstall (not necessary). If you are a new hack user, the instructions you download is already new version's.

Enjoy!
Logician \\=^))

[John Diver]

Hey,
Thank you very much, you have been a great help!
I tried that but I used OR instead of AND, I dont know very much about PHP
Thanks again!
John

[John Diver]

Hey,
Me back again

That worked perfectly but now I am wanting to expand it a bit.
I just went through every page but everything I saw had something extra in and I dont know how to edit them to work for me as I dont know PHP.
What I want to do is have around 6 usergroups which wont see certain code in the header.
The code Im using now is working for 2 usergroups, and I tried changing it for around 6 usersgroups so instead of the 2 not seeing the code inside the conditionals, the 6 now would.
But I couldnt work out what way to do it
Hope you can help me out again

Thanks
John

[Logician]

Originally Posted by John Diver

Hey,
Me back again

That worked perfectly but now I am wanting to expand it a bit.
I just went through every page but everything I saw had something extra in and I dont know how to edit them to work for me as I dont know PHP.
What I want to do is have around 6 usergroups which wont see certain code in the header.
The code Im using now is working for 2 usergroups, and I tried changing it for around 6 usersgroups so instead of the 2 not seeing the code inside the conditionals, the 6 now would.
But I couldnt work out what way to do it
Hope you can help me out again

Thanks
John

[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X1 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X2 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X3 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X4 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X5 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X6)]]
ad code
[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X1 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X2 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X3 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X4 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X5 AND $bbuserinfo[usergroupid]!=X6)]]

Replace X1 to X6 with usergroupids.

[Kaelon]

This is quite possibly the best hack for vB2 that I've ever used to date. Great work, Logician!

[John Diver]

Thank you very much again Logician
This is easily the best hack I have seen, very simple (If you know how to use PHP hehe)

[malcolm fraser]

I've been using this hack on vb2 for a long time, and it's certainly been the most useful hack I've installed - but I've just upgraded to vb3. Does anyone know if this hack will still work?? Or if there is a different or equivalent version for vb3?

Thanks.

--

Oh, just saw your signature message, Logician. No problem. I'll wait.

[malcolm fraser]

Okay, well, I tried a few things and actually got this hack to work very easily in vb3!

Basically, you follow the same instructions, except the functions.php file is now in the "includes" folder.

Then, the line of code to look for is:

PHP Code:

    if ($vboptions['addtemplatename'] AND $gethtmlcomments) 


Just throw the first part of the hack in before this line, and then follow exactly the same instructions for the last part of the hack.

Then follow the standard instructions to apply the conditions to your vb3 templates.

I have no idea if this is the best, or the most elegant, way of doing this - but it is working 100% successfully on my vb3.0.0 installation.

Hope this helps anyone else out there.

[Logician]

Originally Posted by malcolm fraser

Does anyone know if this hack will still work?? Or if there is a different or equivalent version for vb3?

Good thing you made it work in VB3 but you don't need this hack in VB3 since it involves conditional support in templates as a default feature Just its syntax is different.

[malcolm fraser]

Yeah, I noticed the "if condition" stuff in the vb3 templates and figured that's what they were - but I'm afraid I don't really know exactly how they work yet. I'm used to using your hack from vb2, so this "quick port" works out fine for now. If you know of anywhere I can learn more about using the default conditions in vb3, though, I'd certainly be interested.

Anyway, thanks again for this great hack - it was absolutely invaluable in vb2!

[Michi]

Thanks, works very well with vB 2.2.7.

I needed it to do stuff according to $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] and by god, it works!