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]

[Osbes]

This addon support CDNs since 0.6.2

After one sprite (and the rtl version) is created, it should fill the corresponding CSS file like sprite-main.css with content.

Just like Mooff said, please sead us the messages that are shown after the refresh of the sprites

Best regards
Sebastian

[Taurus1]

Originally Posted by Mooff

There should be debug messages during sprite creation. Did any error show up there?

Please send us those messages.

There was no messages. When I clicked Refresh nothing actually showed, I could just see that something was going on, as it said 'Connecting' and it was circling on top of my browser. I could see the sprites being created on my server. But after about 20 minutes my ACP would just give me the time out error. I clicked the Refresh link again, and the same thing happened again. After doing it a third time, right at the end it did display a page with some info on, but I did not save or keep that unfortunately. My bad....sorry!
I disabled it for now, just to get my forum looking OK again.

[sivaganeshk]

I have different images for statusicon (for categories), can this mod can convert it to css Sprites ??

my forum : collegers.net (guess sharing d link is allowed )

[Mooff]

@Taurus1
I can't think of a reason why the debug won't show up. And without debug it is really hard to help, we would have to start guessing and probably won't guess right for a long time.

@sivaganeshk
seems like you are using the vb4 build in prefixes for forums. Our addon can handle that. We use that on our board as well (see livedemo on www.united-forum.de ).

[steeler7]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hello steeler7,

if i understand you correctly you are using folders for the Prefix for Forum Status Images in the AdminCP?

Best regards
Sebastian

Yes. Through the Forums & Moderators panel in the ADMIN CP is where I am placing the number prefix for each individual folder.

Thanks!

[Taurus1]

I disabled the mod until we can figure out what is wrong. But now all my forum icons are still missing on my forumdisplay pages. Please help!

EDIT: Sorry that was a cache issue. All icons back now.

[steeler7]

After looking around and such, I got the "/" removed by using an underscore. So now some folders (only did a couple for now to test) are "1_" and they read out just like yours do at your United-Forums board when I checked with Firebug. I ran the Sprite Refresh and Still no Icons are showing up.

Thanks!

[FReeSTER]

Originally Posted by FReeSTER

this mod is great but it gave me a hard time. For some reason it HIDED must of the forum images.

So I Un-Install until I know how to fix it

thanks

once I installed the Mod after few hrs, I noticed that almost all the statusicons images were HIDE. They were like they never been there..... Once I un-install the Mod after an hr or 2 came back to normal.

[Osbes]

Hello FReeSTER,

this is a weird behavior, have you look into it via firebug or something else?

I would assume that your cache played a trick on you. If you want me to look into it, please give a link were you are using sprites and have this kind of problem, then i can give you a solution

Best regards
Sebastian

[Osbes]

Hello steeler7,

with 0.7.2 i will add a solution for you, so that it will work with using folders for the Prefix for Forum Status Images.

I will build it tomorrow or the day after it.

Best regards
Sebastian