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 \\=^))

[Logician]

Originally posted by Mist
Cuz im my forumdisplay template i want to have one template for a specific forum and i want the default template to apply for the rest... Im sick of doing this with extra styles and assigning a forum a specific style set as it gets too confusing

What you need is this:

PHP Code:

[[($forumid==2)]]
This will be the template for the forums whose id is 2
[[/($forumid==2)]]
[[($forumid!=2)]]
This will be the template for the forums whose id is NOT 2
[[/($forumid!=2)]] 


[Dean C]

lol why didn't i think of the " != "

Thanks buddy

- miSt

[HappyPike]

hey Logician,

Can this hack be use to hide or show certain features such as avatars depending on current server load? If yes, what's the conditionals for that?

Thanks! This is a really useful hack!

[Logician]

Originally posted by HappyPike

Can this hack be use to hide or show certain features such as avatars depending on current server load? If yes, what's the conditionals for that?

As it is, no.

But if you can add another hack which will assign the server load (or anything you like) to a global variable (like in global.php) then yes it can. After you assign the variable value, you should edit postbit template and find the avatar variable (was it $post[avatar] ?) and replace it with this code:

PHP Code:

[[($yourvariable<x)]]
$post[avatar]
[[/($yourvariable<x)]] 


Now avatars would be displayed only when $yourvariable is less than x.

EDIT: BTW. do not forget that this may not help much since the template modifications is just about the visual design. That is, your db would be still queried for the avatar in this example but just not displayed to the end user inside your template. So it wouldnt help decreasing server load much.. just the bandwidth maybe

[John]

Logician - you genius!!

You would not believe the work this hack has saved me, and I installed it in under a minute!

Thanks!

[pool-werbung]

Can i use a condition of the ip of the user? Is there a var that in it is the user-ip?

[NTLDR]

You could try using:

PHP Code:

$HTTP_SERVER_VARS[REMOTE_ADDR] 


No idea if it will work, or if any of the $HTTP variables will work with this hack without modification. I'm sure Logician can shed some light though

[Logician]

NTDLR's method should work.. The hack is compatible with ALL variables in the memory so if I guess $HTTP_SERVER_VARS[REMOTE_ADDR] will work..

Also vb saves user's IP address in "$ipaddress" variable in global.php, so $ipaddress should work too.

However I'm sure you are well aware that IP address is not a good mainstay for conditionals since many users have dynamic IP.

[JakeC]

Excellent Hack! Now even I can feel like a power user!!

JakeC

[Bandit]

I installed this hack and all of a sudden my forums started to show the default templates for every style I have. The template is still the same (in the user cp), but my forums just show the default one... I tried uploading the old functions.php but it did not fix the problem. Any ideas??