Board Optimization - United-Forum CSS Sprites - ludicrous speed - NOW!

tl;dr Makes your forum faster.

Want an easy one-click installation for this addon? . Vote for this jira-entry

Add on currently is in beta stage

When visiting a website, speed is a very important factor not only for users but crawlers as well. Long loading times are a nuisance since your time is basically wasted during the waiting period. Hence, we are trying everything we can in order to speed up our site. One great way to improve loading times is by the use of css sprites. Unfortunately these are not implemented by vBulletin.

We therefore decided to develop our own css-sprite add on for vBulletin boards and want to share this code with the worldwide vBulletin community.

Live demo

The add on is permanently running in our vBulletin board ( > 2.000.000 posts), take a look:
http://www.united-forum.de

The add on will be supported via this thread. If you have any questions, issues, improvements or feedback regarding this add on, please feel free to post a comment or write us a pm at any time. We are happy to discuss

vBulletin performance using css sprites

Our tests are based on version 0.7.0. We used the analytic tools firebug network utility and the googlelabs.com page speed site

on the client side the following parameter were used:
download speed: 5.7 MBit/s
ping: 31ms

css sprites - what are they?

The intention behind css sprites is the bundling of many small graphics into one large graphic in order to decrease the number of required http requests. This shortens the loading times of the given website. In addition, the the accumulated size of all small graphics is higher than the size of the sprite due to reasons of compression.
You can find further information in a great article by Chris Coyier.

What is the gain in using css sprites?

Aside from the technical implementation, the question on how much one actually does gain by using css sprites is of the most interest. Obviously they decrease loading times - but how important are small loading times and what is the impact on vBulletin overall loading times?

A short time ago, Jasper Aguila pointed out that speed is one crucial stickiness factor in his blog on vBulletin.com.

Originally Posted by Jasper Aguila vBulletin Support

The internet has unfortunately contributed to the exponential decrease in attention span for many individuals. That's why this decade is seeing a trend in emerging technologies emphasizing the importance of speed request. It's crucial for your content to be promptly distributed in a timely manner, else bounce rate will increase - making you lose returning visitors. It's also important to note that slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

With better browsers, more powerful processors, and improved technologies constantly releasing each year, it's becoming quite difficult to provide excuses for slow loading pages. Therefore, try optimizing your server for speed. Read up and learn optimization techniques at vBulletin.com's Server Configuration forum.

In addition, the google ranking is influenced by the site speed as well.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Originally Posted by 09.04.2010 - Google Webmaster Central Blog

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

vBseo Webmaster Mert G?k?eimam

CSS sprites is a huge bonus for big boards , any big board owner definately should use it.

Last but not least, not only the user's loading time is reduced, but also does the server load decrease as the server will have to handle a lot less of http requests. This clears available connections and cpu time.

Add on features

In the current released beta version 0.7.2, sprites are available for FORUMHOME and FORUMDISPLAY. Coming up next SHOWTHREAD.

Sprites are created style based for all forum styles and saved in a folder which you can set via the imgdir_sprite stylevar. You have one additional button in the ACP (CSS-Sprites -> Refresh) which automatically creates all sprites, the according css definitions and includes those css definitions in the vBulletin css rollup files.

Installation

First of all, if you didnt want to change the templates manually, install the Template Modification System (TMS). Now proceed with the installation:

• upload the contents of the upload folder into your forum home directory.
• import the add on in the ACP
• upon installation a new stylevar imgdir_sprite will be created. Update this stylevar based on your file structure - default value is the vbulletin sprite directory. Make sure the folder is writable, else the sprites can't be saved!
• create the sprites via the ACP at CSS-Sprite using the Refresh option.
• If you have installed TMS, you are done now. This was an easy gained speed up, not? If you didnt installed TMS and didnt want to do it, proceed with the next point:
• in order to use the sprites, you then will have to edit some templates. The diffs (xou will find it in the do_not_upload folder show which parts you have to delete '<' and which parts to add '>' In addition, on top find the lines in which you will find the respective code.[/b]

[final kaoss]

DF2
Error occurred: Your sprite folder uses an URL. Sprites cannot be saved via URLs. Please use an local filepath on your system for the StyleVar imgdir_sprite.

[DNCL]

Problem solved. , still the search results issue as giorgino mentioned.

[8thos]

Good news. This mod really did create sprites but because I was doing so many changes to my styles and because of the delay from my CDN, webpagetest.org didn't give me an accurate score. I will have to try again later.

With this new update, do we still have to install template modification system?

I disabled template modification system because it changed the way I access edit templates and was too confusing to mess around with.

[Mooff]

I was talking about the stylevars: imgdir_statusicon / imgdir_misc / imgdir_button / imgdir_siteicons /
Stylevars where our addon needs to read the old files. The files which are displayed when our addon is not running. The files which shall be replaced by our addon.

Of course we cannot connect to an external server to write the sprite. So imgdir_sprite has to be local - which is stated as an error via the addon.

edit: TMS is not needed. You can do all template changes manually. But i would strongly advise to use TMS, since the number of changes is really high. TMS does them in a blink of an eye. Manually does take it's time though.
As a sidenote. If vb4 would have native sprite support, no user based template changes would be necessary at all.

[final kaoss]

This is exactly where I made the edits like you suggested. In the stylevars.

so add http://vgchat.info/i1/statusicon/ as your statusicon image directory. That might work, that might not work. Or maybe http://1i/vgchat.info/ or http://3i/vgchat.info. Help me helping you - i really cannot work with the level of information you do provide.

Originally Posted by Mooff

I was talking about the stylevars: imgdir_statusicon / imgdir_misc / imgdir_button / imgdir_siteicons /
Stylevars where our addon needs to read the old files. The files which are displayed when our addon is not running. The files which shall be replaced by our addon.


Of course we cannot connect to an external server to write the sprite. So imgdir_sprite has to be local - which is stated as an error via the addon.


edit: TMS is not needed. You can do all template changes manually. But i would strongly advise to use TMS, since the number of changes is really high. TMS does them in a blink of an eye. Manually does take it's time though.
As a sidenote. If vb4 would have native sprite support, no user based template changes would be necessary at all.

[Mooff]

               if(strpos($stylevars['imgdir_sprite']['imagedir'], 'http://') !== false)
                {
                    echo '<span style="color:red">Error occurred:</span> Your sprite folder uses an URL. Sprites cannot be saved via URLs. Please use an local filepath on your system for the StyleVar imgdir_sprite.<br />';
                }

That's when you receive that error. That is the only time you will receive that error. You won't get that error when you change the statusicon imgdir.
So please change your imgdir_sprite folder to a local path - and keep the other ones at http.

[8thos]

Originally Posted by Mooff

I was talking about the stylevars: imgdir_statusicon / imgdir_misc / imgdir_button / imgdir_siteicons /
Stylevars where our addon needs to read the old files. The files which are displayed when our addon is not running. The files which shall be replaced by our addon.


Of course we cannot connect to an external server to write the sprite. So imgdir_sprite has to be local - which is stated as an error via the addon.


edit: TMS is not needed. You can do all template changes manually. But i would strongly advise to use TMS, since the number of changes is really high. TMS does them in a blink of an eye. Manually does take it's time though.
As a sidenote. If vb4 would have native sprite support, no user based template changes would be necessary at all.

When you say manual template changes do you mean in just the stylevars or in edit templates?

[Mooff]

Edit templates.

Every (supported) imagecode in the templates needs to be replaced via a fitting sprite class.

[8thos]

Originally Posted by Mooff

Edit templates.

Every (supported) imagecode in the templates needs to be replaced via a fitting sprite class.

I don't know if there's a bug in my template modification system or what but I can't edit templates in it. That's why I said it was hard and confusing cause I played around with it and it won't let me do anything.

So to get sprites working I'd have to turn it on and when I want to edit templates I'd have to disable template modification system which would then disable the sprites in united forum sprites mod?

smh.

I'll bug vb.com to add sprite support. Might take them two years.

[Crotan]

Upgrade Instructions?

Upload Files
Upload XML
Done if using TMS
Do refresh to find new supported images

Anything else?