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]

[chatpalace24]

Well here my testscenarios :
1 Testserver Windows 7 pro 74bit WAMPP VB 4.1.10 Suit in a subfolder of htdcos called /forums
Everything works fine , Sprites generated and showing up. but TMS doesnt work.

2 Testserver : Debian Squeeze up to date System, Testforum installs on subforum , TMS doesnt Work.

3. my working Forum, without Subfolders . TMS works ?! strange...TMS work like it done before. Well. With the Sprite Addon my Forum Icons (special Addon for it) shows the original Icons and not my special Ones. So i cant install that addon.

[Osbes]

Such behavior shouldnt correlate with your operating system, since we didnt depend on anything the system generates.

The point, that your working forum now doesnt have any problems with TMS, seems strange, so maybe it is a problem with the TMS beta. I think it is the best to see what happens with the next version, maybe it will solve this, since it doenst use TMS anymore.
If not, i will gladly look at this again.


What i am more interested in at this point is the addon you use to change your forum icons. Can you tell me the name of this addon? I dindt get a repsonse from Popa Andrei until now.

Maybe it is even the same addon giorgino used before (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=244351).

Since customize each icon per forum is a built in feature of vBulletin, called forum prefix, (which we support since our first version of this addon, cause we use this ourself), using the built in feature solved this matter for giorgino (and reduces the time of maintenance work, since there is one external addon less)

A fully solution can be found here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....0&postcount=36 (and the following up post by mooff)

Best regards
Sebastian

[chatpalace24]

@osbes
well, the addon was the same like that from giogino. So i deinstalled and make it with forum prefixes. Works nice .
So the next thing is that i must recompile php to use GD Library 2.36 or higher. Cause php 5.3.3.7 squeeze 7 is compiled with gd 2.3.4.
here the gd Part of my PHP Info :

PHP Code:

GD Support     enabled
GD Version     2.0
FreeType Support     enabled
FreeType Linkage     with freetype
FreeType Version     2.4.2
T1Lib Support     enabled
GIF Read Support     enabled
GIF Create Support     enabled
JPEG Support     enabled
libJPEG Version     6b
PNG Support     enabled
libPNG Version     1.2.44
WBMP Support     enabled 


it would be nicer with ImageMagick 6.x because you dont have to recompile .

The Problem is, that the most icons or graphics not converted into Sprites . Error is : you are using gd version 2.3.4 .....

[Osbes]

Nice to hear, that this solved your problem with the forum icons. Maybe this will also be the solution for Popa Andrei (if he currently depends on the same addon instead the built-in solution).


If you are using, the embed version of GD within PHP, this issue is fixed since PHP 5.3.0, so there shouldn't be any need to recompile.

The error regarding the version of GD is experimental and is not included in the upcomming version. The problem with this is, that there is not consequent way the version of GD is adressed by PHP, so we can't make 100% sure that it is the correct version or not.

The main problem with an outdated GD version (and the current only neccesary part to update this) is when your sprite has icons that looks like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin_result.png (it is stretched and vertical lines are added), cause before GD 2.0.36 , GD D had a problem handling grayscale images with alpha channel correctly.

There wont be any support for ImageMagick in the next versions, since there is currently no know adapter class which supports GD an ImageMagick. As long as there i no such class, i wont support ImageMagick, since i have to write a big amount of the main part a second time and cant guarantee that it works, since we dont use ImageMagick for our live forum.

Which icons are missing in your sprite?

Pls see the FAQ, for similar problems: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....93&postcount=2 maybe this will help you faster as i can response

Best regards
Sebastian

[John Lester]

Is there an updated e.t.a. on the 4.1.10 release?

[thecore762]

Works fine with 4.1.10.
Excellent product moof!

[Gn_Snake]

Hello Osbes,
when do you update for new version?

Hello Gn_Snake,

vbulletin-germany.com released the german version of vB 4.1.10 about 5 hours ago. I think within one week we should be ready to upgrade our live forum and make the final tests with the new version. Shortly after this, we will upload the new version here.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Alfa1]

4.1.11 has been released. TMS reports template issues.

[sarangan]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

4.1.11 has been released. TMS reports template issues.

I have the same problem and waiting for a fix. Thanks in advance :-)

[BlueCheri]

Installed, but confused in third step

G!