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]

[majjed2008]

i keep reading this thread but it is really hard to me to do it , is there any service to apply this or can some one help please

[majjed2008]

can anyone help me how to delete it ?
and make my tamp let back how it was i dont have backup , all my forum look strange now

[Morpheuss89]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Version 0.7.2 (06.08.2011)

• now supporting folders for forum prefixes
• sprite generation splittet to avoid timeouts on sites which a huge number of styles
• checks if the gd version is 2.0.36 or higher (experimental)

Version 0.7.1 (01.08.2011)

• added support for search.php pages including What's New
• some minor bugfixes

Version 0.7.0 (01.08.2011)

• full support for ltr/rtl
• forum sidebar support added
• FORUMDISPLAY support added

Version 0.6.3 (23.07.2011)

• Added the possibility to use TMS for automatic template modification.
• Icons can now be merged into different sprites and css rollups instead of one big sprite.
• Addon is now compatible with vBulletin 4.1.x

Version 0.6.2 (17.07.2011)

• Added support for http filepaths and therefore one-way support for CDNs
• Templates are now using the cache system
• clientscript/sprite_vbulletin_collapse.js removed.

Version 0.6.1 (17.07.2011)

• bug-fix: using alternative paths for post icons could cause that these are not includes in the sprite.

Version 0.6.0 (17.07.2011)

• possibility to add custom icons into the sprite via plugin-hook sprite_add_icon
• added log output during sprite generation in the acp
• option to deactivate using post icons in your sprite (default should be on)

Version 0.5.1 (12.07.2011)

• Added support php versions < 5.3.0. Addon now just requires php5 due to TypeHinting

Version 0.5.0 (12.07.2011)

• Add-On release
• FORUMHOME css-sprite support

3 weeks of updates in the last year and after nothing... why ? this mod was really promising... what a pity :/

[jreuc]

I agree that this mod was really promising and should be continued.

I have experienced the same issue as many other people here with the custom status icons (wrong subdirectory used by the mod). A quick fix would be to disable status icons from the CSS sprites. How can we do that ?

[Chadi]

<a href="https://gtmetrix.com/reports/talkjesus.com/eADCrAX4" target="_blank">http://gtmetrix.com/reports/talkjesus.com/eADCrAX4</a>

I followed steps, seems like it created only 2 sprite png files

Still getting an F rating on sprites/css?

[Justinphx]

I installed this months ago and it didn't do anything. It will create a couple of sprites but I am not sure they work. The concept sounded promising but it isn't.

[fly]

Originally Posted by Justinphx

I installed this months ago and it didn't do anything. It will create a couple of sprites but I am not sure they work. The concept sounded promising but it isn't.

Then you're doing something wrong.

[Lpspider]

Getting the following error upon "refresh" after install:

Database error in vBulletin 4.2.0:

Invalid SQL:

SELECT t1.templateeditid AS templateeditid_1, t1.varname ,
t1.templateeditid AS templateeditid_1, t1.styleid AS styleid_1 ,
t2.templateeditid AS templateeditid_2, t2.styleid AS styleid_2
FROM wftemplateedit AS t1
LEFT JOIN wftemplateedit AS t1 ON (t1.varname=t1.varname AND t1.styleid=-2)
LEFT JOIN wftemplateedit AS t2 ON (t1.varname=t2.varname AND t2.styleid=17)
WHERE t1.styleid = -1;

MySQL Error : Not unique table/alias: 't1'
Error Number : 1066
Request Date : Sunday, December 23rd 2012 @ 10:19:58 PM
Error Date : Sunday, December 23rd 2012 @ 10:19:59 PM
Script : http://www.site.org/admincp/sprite.php?do=donerefresh
Referrer : http://www.site.org/admincp/sprite.p...esh&startat=18
IP Address : 217.23.15.243
Username : Lpspider
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.96-community

Thoughts?

No change in speed or rating for spirits.

Edit:

Updated the tms patch and the product a few pages back and it installed without the errors.

Speed only slightly increased, and "Combine images into CSS sprites" is listed as a high priority.

It looks like the gradient, misc, and site_icons folder weren't included... should they have been?

[craigvm]

this looks a great mod i`ve installed it but when i went to look at the file to see what templates to edit its a .diff file and i`ve got nothing that can open it or i cant find any program to open it and the mod to auto edit the template gave a database error so uninstalled that so can any1 give me the info on what templates to edit in a notepad file please

[ProFifaLeagues]

Originally Posted by craigvm

this looks a great mod i`ve installed it but when i went to look at the file to see what templates to edit its a .diff file and i`ve got nothing that can open it or i cant find any program to open it and the mod to auto edit the template gave a database error so uninstalled that so can any1 give me the info on what templates to edit in a notepad file please

Most diff Files will open with Notepad or Notepad++ fella Try again and open yours to See what Differences Show between your template's .