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]

[Johan Hiemstra]

Originally Posted by Popa Andrei

This looks like a lot of extra work?Cant this plugin be made to work without the TMS plugin since the TMS plugin its not even supported anymore?

I'm using it without TMS, made the changes from the diff manually, works great, and gives enough insight in the sprite and css to extend the sprite with custom (like CMS) icons manually. Making the changes manually takes maybe half an hour, it's just annoying to do it every update obviously (so vote for the hook Mooff mentioned in the post above). In any case, it's worth the effort.

[CharlieDelta]

Originally Posted by Mooff

Osbes came up with a great idea to automatize the template changes, but we need a php-hook for it. He just started a jira-report on it. Please vote for that hook, so we can improve the addon:
http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-13825

Cheers

Voted. :up:

[fly]

Originally Posted by Popa Andrei

This looks like a lot of extra work?Cant this plugin be made to work without the TMS plugin since the TMS plugin its not even supported anymore?

Supported? It never was. However, its still available and is actively being developed.

edit: BTW, it looks like there was a change to the template for serach.png in the navbar in vB 4.1.9. Mod will probably need to be updated. If you're using TMS, just change the Search For text from:

<input type="image" class="searchbutton" src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_button}/search<vb:if condition="$stylevar['textdirection'] == 'rtl'">_rtl</vb:if>.<vb:if condition="(is_browser('ie') AND !is_browser('ie', 7) AND !is_browser('ie', 8))">gif<vb:else />png</vb:if>" name="submit" onclick="document.getElementById('navbar_search').submit;" tabindex="100"/>

To:

<input type="image" class="searchbutton" src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_button}/search<vb:if condition="$stylevar['textdirection'] == 'rtl'">_rtl</vb:if>.<vb:if condition="is_browser('ie') AND !is_browser('ie', 7)">gif<vb:else />png</vb:if>" name="submit" onclick="document.getElementById('navbar_search').submit;" tabindex="100"/>

[K!nG]

Hello,
I really need to install this on my site but i need to make sure is it going to work on 4.1.9 ??? Or is there any other mod which can perform same things as this one ???

Thanks in advance

[rjmjr69]

Originally Posted by K!nG

Hello,
I really need to install this on my site but i need to make sure is it going to work on 4.1.9 ??? Or is there any other mod which can perform same things as this one ???

Thanks in advance

Works fine and see above your post Even works with newest beta

[kizy]

I thank you for your kind and being working hard. I appreciate it for all your works.
this is a great mod but I decide to uninstall the product and will check back later after my forum get reorganize...

I have a question, I did uninstall product + delete all uploaded files, but in my Style Variable Editor it still show the ImagePaths\imgdir_sprite\ images/sprites

Is there anything you can advise how to completely remove this imgdir_sprite in Sty Variable Editor

Regards,

[Lazorbeam]

This is a great addon, if it were developed further and updated you could easily sell it (please don't bash me people!).

Where custom icons are concerned; I don't understand why you would need to manually add them? I just added a custom icon without any addons, refreshed sprites, and everything worked fine. Although, I suppose this wouldn't help you add border images etc...

Anyone care to make a guide on how to get this working on CMS etc?

[doctorsexy]

Has anyone added more than 1 custom icon

[Lazorbeam]

Osbes' hook was implemented in 4.1.10!

[Osbes]

Hello,

big thanks for your support regarding the new hook!

I am currently working on this and will start within the next days the first live tests on our forum. When everything is working fine, Mooff or me will upload the updated version.

Since we are using a german vBulletin Suite, it will took some time, cause we need to wait for our final test until vbulletin-germany.com releases 4.1.10. And then it will took us a few days more, before we are installing the new version of vBulletin.

Currently, since our live forum runs on 4.1.8, i have to test the behavior by directly changing the /includes/class_core.php at the point, where will can use the hook with 4.1.10.

Best regards
Osbes