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]

[Andyrew]

Just installed and I get this when I run refresh. ?

/home/xxxxxx/public_html/forums/images/statusicon/forum_new_lock-16.png (with bburl_path / ) does not exist or is not readable.
/home/xxxxxx/public_html/forums/images/statusicon/forum_old_lock-16.png (with bburl_path / ) does not exist or is not readable.

Those images appear chopped of at the bottom in firefox even look worse in IE.

[Osbes]

Hi Andyrew,

both images currently doesnt exists within vBulletin, but there are possibile values for:

{vb:stylevar imgdir_statusicon}/{vb:raw forum.imageprefix}forum_{vb:raw forum.statusicon}-16.png

I think i will remove these until they are delivered by vBulletin, to cause less confusion.

Those images appear chopped of at the bottom in firefox even look worse in IE.

What did you mean by that? Please provide more details (an images maybe or your site-url) to this problem.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Andyrew]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hi Andyrew,


What did you mean by that? Please provide more details (an images maybe or your site-url) to this problem.

Best regards
Sebastian

Many of the icons don't look correct when I enable your plugin.

[Mooff]

You are not using the latest Version.
This first bug is fixed in 0.7.1 (showthread icons)
The attachment icon is due to a bug in GD version 2.0.35. A version which is >4 years old and has some security issues which were fixed 4 years ago.

We need more infos on the FORUMHOME icons though. We can't reproduce that. Would be great if you can link us to your site (maybe a teststyle), where we can see what is causing that behaviour.

[Crotan]

Just noticed in the 0.7.1 zip file, the product xml that is included in there is still 0.7.0a, or atleast the version id wasn't updated to reflect the new version.

the separate xml seems to be updated but I just downloaded the zip file since it includes both

[steeler7]

Uh-Oh....

I am missing pretty much every icon possible on my forum after I went through and did all of the template stuff.

Any idea what I did wrong?

[final kaoss]

That's the same thing happening on the skin that I have this plugin installed on

http://vgchat.info/forum/index.php?styleid=16

Originally Posted by Andyrew

Many of the icons don't look correct when I enable your plugin.

Also this really needs to be changed for people who have images on subdomains/cdn's like myself. Because I tried to add http://i1.vgchat.info/ to the sprite stylevars since thats the only way I know of to point it there while the forum is sitting on http://vgchat.info/forum/
I have my images there because there, they are cookie-free

DF2
Error occurred: Your sprite folder uses an URL. Sprites cannot be saved via URLs. Please use an local filepath on your system for the StyleVar imgdir_sprite.

[Osbes]

If you have some image like

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin.png

which looks like

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin_result.png

in the Sprite (it is stretched and vertical lines are added), than you possible use a GD Libary older than 2.0.36.

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

GD 2.0.36 (2007-11-xx)
88, Fixed support of PNG grayscale image with alpha channel (Pierre)

https://bitbucket.org/pierrejoye/gd-...361a31aab/NEWS

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 in the Year 2009 by Debian.

2009

libgd2 (2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-3+lenny1) stable-security; urgency=high

* Non-maintainer upload by the Security Team.
* Fixed CVE-2009-3546: possible buffer overflow or buffer over-read attacks via crafted files (Closes: #552534)

-- Giuseppe Iuculano <iuculano@debian.org> Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:46:06 +0100

I am totally shocked by this, since there seem to be a whole bunch of people with this kind of problem and this fix is 4 years old and since 2 years known als high security fix by debian.
So there seems to be a lot problem within the maintenance of servers, if some serious security issue isnt solved since 2-4 years. If you pay money for server maintenance i would be deeply shocked, if i were you.

Best regards
Sebastian

[archet1337]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hello archet1337,

please give an full example of your situation, this would help us to give you the best solution

Best regards
Sebastian

Hello Sebastian and Mooff.

I need the following images to be converted into sprites:


http://www.radioctrl.com/highslide/g...ader.white.gif
Defined in highslide.css

.highslide-loading {
	background-image: url(graphics/loader.white.gif);

http://www.radioctrl.com/images/gradients/grey-up.png
Defined in socialgroups_overview.css

li.sgicon .maincol {
background:#ffffff url({vb:stylevar imgdir_gradients}/grey-up.png) repeat-x scroll

and stylegenerator.css

.forumhead+.childforum .L2:first-child .forumrow,.forumhead+.L2 .forumrow
background: #FFFFFF url(images/gradients/grey-up.png) repeat-x scroll

http://www.radioctrl.com/images/styl...misc/arrow.png
Defined in additional.css

.toplinks .notifications a.popupctrl {	
background: #242424 url({vb:stylevar imgdir_misc}/arrow.png) {vb:stylevar right} center no-repeat ;

http://www.radioctrl.com/images/styl...ottomBarBG.gif
Defined in additional.css

.bottomBar {
background:url(images/styles/Aesthetica/style/bottomBarBG.gif) repeat-x top left;

There is a couple more, but you get the idea?

What do I do to make the images defined in css files into sprites?

[Mooff]

@exterme-gaming

Version 0.6.2 (17.07.2011)

Added support for http filepaths and therefore one-way support for CDNs

The addon has CDN support since version 0.6.2 - users have confirmed it does work with CDNs. You issue has nothing to do with our addon but simply with the fact that you do not listen at all. And god knows we tried to help.