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]

[Mooff]

@MNNLeafre
Sprite doesn't match the css rules. Try the sprite refresh option.

@MonkYZ
please check your stylevar imgdir settings in the ACP. Make sure the folder there says cpstyles and not les

[maxie]

This product is not compatible with version 4.1.2 of vBulletin. (Compatible starting with 4.1.3)

huhu i want to install in 4.1.2 but is not compatible

[Mooff]

@maxie

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hello kingMOB,

the addon has internally vBulletin 4.1.3 and above as depency.

product-sprite-0.7.2.xml

<dependency dependencytype="vbulletin" minversion="4.1.3" maxversion="" />

You can change this to

<dependency dependencytype="vbulletin" minversion="4.0.8" maxversion="" />

or lower to run it with vBulletin 4.0.8.

I have set this thread to vB Version: 4.x.x, since it should work with 4.x.x theoretically (as far as i can see), but until now it wasnt independent and practically confirmed, thats why the minversion is currently set to 4.1.3, the lowest vBulletin version for which it was confirmed in a live system.

Best regards
Sebastian

Hope that helps. =)

[PirateTinman]

An issue I see with this mod is that is uses an un-official, and un-supported version of GD that you can only get with a lot of finecking about. Since GD is more or less dead, there will not be a new update of it, and would not be integrated with new PHP releases. So this would only work on very few websites.

I suggest to the creator if they want more usage of this hack, that they make it work with the supported version of GD, or convert it to work with Image Magic.

If this could be done, and it actually works, I would not mind supporting it for a very long time, since its one of the things that should speed up a website by a lot, and its the only thing Google is complaining about.

[Mooff]

@PirateTinman
What are you talking about?
This addon uses the GD version which is installed on your server. If you choose to install an un-official and un-supported version of GD on your server that is your choice.

This addon does not include, require or install an un-supported, un-official version of GD.

[universosymbian]

This mod is not working properly and does more pages fast, I think interest is

[PirateTinman]

@Moof
Not what I am saying at all.
The issue is that this does not work with GD version 2.0.34
If you have this version of GD it will not work properly, the forum icons get cut off at the bottom, but if you run a newer un-supported and more or less impossible to get version 2.0.36 it will work.

If you look back at other posts people are having the same issue, the image is getting cropped at the bottom, and they all seem to be running 2.0.34

So as far as I can tell, this mod only works with an un-supported version of GD, and the only way to get it working is to recompile PHP, something a lot of people do not want to do.

[Mooff]

For clarification - quote from the first page out of the FAQ:

Originally Posted by Osbes

Frequently Asked Questions

Question
My Icon (mostly the paperclip) looks like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin_result.png (it is stretched and vertical lines are added), what can i do?

Answer
I assume you use a GD Libary older than 2.0.36.

GD had a problem handling grayscale images with alpha channel correctly, which was fixed with GD 2.0.36 in the year 2007.

The solution is to update the GD-Libary to 2.0.36 (or later) or replace every file which uses "gray+alpha" with an version using "color RGBA".
I would advise to update the GD-Libary, cause there is also a serious security problem, that was fixed by Debian in the year 2009.

For the embed Version of GD within PHP, this issue is fixed since PHP 5.3.0.

I do not understand why you keep refering to the GD Version which was released 2007 as unsupported. I don't understand either why you refer to it as "impossible to get".

As for the "cut off at bottom" bug. I do not know what is the cause of that, but we have seen forums which run GD 2.0.34 which do not have this bug (those can be identified via the "grey-bug" this GD version has, see the quote if this is unclear).


And there are a lot of "as far as i know" "they all seem to" statements in your post which make me wonder why your are posting a bold statement like "this mod will only work on very few websites".

[Mickie D]

To be honest Moof

I keep checking back on this thread with the HOPE that you will support Image Magic

with image magick you do not need to re-compile anything if the version you are using (GD) is not supported.

It is by far superior in every way to GD.

Any website that is serious about images USES Image Magick.

We can only hope that this fantastic Mod - "that I voted for Mod of the month - even though I cannot use it " will one day support image magick

Mick

[Mooff]

What do you mean by not supported?

It does work with GD 2.0.34 and below. It's just that GD 2.0.34 has a grey-scale bug, which does affect like 1 out of 100 icons and can be solved by manually converting the icon to rgba.

In addition GD 2.0.34 has a security issue, therefore we advise to upgrade, but upgrading is not necessary for the addon to work.

Point is php has a GD libary included, so by far more servers will have gd than imagemagick. That's why the choice was made to go with GD.

Aside that there is a bug somewhere which causes a cutoff on some icons. But we do not know what the issue is there exactly and can't reproduce it on our server.