WebTemplates v.0.1 (Old Version)

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Attention: This version of webtemplates is obsolete since new version (2.xx) is released as of 30.June.2003.

If you are new user, please visit new hack's thread and install that one, not this version.

This thread is active for discussing migration issues and will be closed in the future.
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Introduction:
Basically this hack allows you create vbulletin powered non-vb pages within vb admin CP and administer them just like vb templates.

Your "webtemplates" reside inside MYSQL and have the same structure as regular vbulletin templates and you edit/modify/delete them inside your Admin CP. You can create as many as you like and display them like:
http://yoursite URL/yourboard URL/show.php?pg=YOUR_WEBTEMPLATE_NAME.

Features of Your WebTemplates:
* You can easily edit/update your non-vb pages from your vb control panel just like vb templates. No need to FTP or smt.
* Simply backup your vbulletin and your entire site (including your webtemplates) is backed up too.
* You can use some vbulletin variables in your non-vb pages, so eg. address your members with their member names in your entire site.
* Your entire web site can mimic your forum's visual interface. All your fonts/colors etc. are kept in your non-vb. pages too. Besides users' style sets apply for your web templates either. So for instance if you have 2 styles, every user will see your webtemplates in the style and colors they are using in the board.
* This hack allows you to specify usergroups/usernames which can or cannot see the page you designed. So your non-vb pages can inherit vb. access permissions. Every webtemplate can have different display permissions for different users/usergroups.
* You can have counters in your pages and show/trace page visits individually for all your pages. Every webtemplate has its own counter.
* You can have "last visitor's name and visit time" in all your pages.
* You can insert fixed header/footer for all your pages.
* The "conditionals" you can set, allow you to design advanced and dynamic web pages, which change themselves according to the conditions you set. For example you can set different texts/page designs IN THE SAME PAGE for different users and every user will only see the text that is addressed to him.

Webtemplates are very easy to create. Just copy paste the HTML code of your page into the webtemplate box, give it a name, click submit and voila, your webtemplate is up and running! By using this method, you can convert your existing non-vb pages into webtemplates with ease too. It is just a matter of copy/paste its HMTML code. Installation of the hack is easy too and the hack will work any version of vbulletin I know.

For Advanced Users: If you want your webtemplates to get data from your database and display it, you have an advanced feature named "webqueries". WebQueries feature allows you to run SQL queries in your MYSQL database and automatically create sorted tables for you which you can add in any WebTemplates. So your non-vb pages can be dynamic and you can have any kind of SQL results (related with vb or not) in any page you want. Webqueries are optional to use and appeals to people with basic SQL knowledge. You can still create webtemplates very easily without using webqueries if you don't know SQL or don't need to query your database in your webtemplate. If you want to play with webqueries, please read and follow instructions CAREFULLY. This hack gives you advanced tools to create powerful and dynamic web pages, so give yourself sometime and learn how to create these pages. I wrote help pages which you can find in your webtemplates section after installation, so please read them carefully and examine sample page's code before pelting me with questions!

If you installed this hack, share your webquery samples in this thread


Fixes and Add-ons:
* If you have than 1 MYSQL databases, webquery section might not work properly. If you encounter any problems related to that issue, apply the small fix in this post.[/COLOR]
* If you want to display your webtemplates in who is online, apply this small hack .
Also there is a small bug with "conditionals" feature of the hack, if you use more than 1 conditional in 1 webtemplate. I guess very few people use this feature but anyway I fixed it in the new release that is in progress..
* If you want your webtemplates search engine friendly and indexed in google or other search engines, read this tip by Piper.

Current version (BETA v.0.1) is NOT actually a beta anymore, it's proven to be working very well in many people's boards and is stable.

I plan to develop this hack. However to enhance it more, I need to change its algortihm which requires rewriting and I wait for VB3 so that the hack will will be competible with VB3 too. That's why development is pending at the moment.


If you install the hack please click install, thank you.

Regards,
Logician //=^))

[Logician]

Please check the screenshot attached..I got this screen when I tried to call the url you referred. Dont you get this screen?

This screen indicates that hack has been installed successfuly and it's working. If you get the error after you login, this is very likely because there is something wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access (not the hack itself).

If so please double check there is nothing wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access. Try this text to replace your "whoareyou" webtemplate:
-- cut--
[cantsee]everybody[/cantsee][cansee]1 2 TestUser2 6 testuser1[/cansee]
[options]templatequeryon[/options]
{htmldoctype}
<html>
<head>
<title>$bbtitle</title>
<p align="left">$headinclude </head> <body> $header <br><p>

<p align="left"> <normal>TEST PAGE LOADED SUCCESSFULLY!</normal></p>
$footer
-- cut --
Login with the user userid 1 and lets see if it works now..

[Khaybel]

great hack I've been looking for something like this with out having to use a vbportal, I'm prob going to try and content most of my site over to this hack. (http://www.orbsydia.com) as I've been wanting to convert my site to php anyway, this will really speed things up.

When it's all done let me know where to send a donation or two... and where to download your final after beta

[Logician]

Originally posted by Khaybel
When it's all done let me know where to send a donation or two... and where to download your final after beta

Khaybel I'll be much more delighted if you return me feedback about the hack, instead of a sending a donation

I understand people posting about their problems but I would like to hear "hey I installed it and it works without any problems" messages, especially considering the fact that this is beta. Same applies for number of people who installed this hack, which certainly does not help motivating me improving the hack more as I mentioned in the other thread.

However if you are determined to spend a few bucks, just donate to a charity of any kind. That will sure make me happy!

Thanks for the nice comments..

Regards,
Logician

[Khaybel]

I just finished installing the hack, it went in smoothly, I'm sure if it was on a php version of the forums it would be perfect for the install, although I use the php3 versions of the forums, so had to make a few name changes from php to php3, but nothing major.

I used ultra edit to do a mass fine and replace for your php to php3 extensions.

Small update: As of june 1st/2002
Just got new rack server, so reinstalling this hack with 226, will post new layout link with script in action when I have it up, thank you for all your hard work.

[The Piper]

Hi Logician,

Thanks for your answer and sorry I took I while to write back. Real life has been a bit hectic. I just reinstalled vB 2.2.5 just to be sure none of the hacks I had installed was interfering with WebTemplates.

Anyway, I reinstalled the hack and almost everything works fine now:

The template webtemplate_help is showing up perfectly. However, whoareyou still gives me a "mySQL error:No Database Selected" error. I tried to create a new template, identical to whoareyou, called test, and played with it for a while.

I found out that the line

[options]templatequeryon[/options]

Is what messes things up. If I remove that line, as I did in the template "test" (check it out, I changed it also to [cansee]everyone[/cantsee], so you should be able to: http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/show.php?pg=test), things show up, although the queries don't work (of course).

I'd really appreciate your input on this. I'm planning on using WebTemplates to run my entire site, along with vbIndex and/or vbHome (Lite).

Again, many thanks for your help and congratulations on creating one of the best hacks I've ever seen!

Shine on,
Paulo

Originally posted by Logician
Please check the screenshot attached..I got this screen when I tried to call the url you referred. Dont you get this screen?

This screen indicates that hack has been installed successfuly and it's working. If you get the error after you login, this is very likely because there is something wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access (not the hack itself).

If so please double check there is nothing wrong with the webtemplate you are trying to access. Try this text to replace your "whoareyou" webtemplate:
-- cut--
[cantsee]everybody[/cantsee][cansee]1 2 TestUser2 6 testuser1[/cansee]
[options]templatequeryon[/options]
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>$bbtitle</title>
<p align="left">$headinclude </head> <body> $header <br><p>

<p align="left"> <normal>TEST PAGE LOADED SUCCESSFULLY!</normal></p>
$footer
-- cut --
Login with the user userid 1 and lets see if it works now..

[Logician]

Originally posted by The Piper
[options]templatequeryon[/options]
Is what messes things up. If I remove that line, as I did in the template "test" (check it out, I changed it also to [cansee]everyone[/cantsee], so you should be able to: http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/show.php?pg=test), things show up, although the queries don't work (of course).

Can you put the line back in the template. I want to see the error message. And needless to say: Your webqueries (that is in the webtempate) exists in your database right? If webtemplate tries to process an webtemplate which exists in the webtemplate but does not exist in your database (ie vb cp), this error can occur. So please double check you have existing (at least default) webqueries in your admin cp. (via modify webquery). If I'm not wrong you should have

_last_10_threads [edit] [remove]
Gets user's last 10 threads from forum database
_privateevents [edit] [remove]
Gets user's recent private calender event list

webqueries by default. Check their content seems intact too..For example as for _privateevents :

Query is:

SELECT eventid, eventdate, subject FROM calendar_events WHERE userid="$user_userid" AND public="0" ORDER BY eventdate ASC

Table Row is:
<li><normalfont><a href="$bburl/calendar.php?s=&action=getinfo&eventid=??eventid?? ">??subject??</a></normalfont> <smallfont>(??eventdate??)</smallfont></li>

Does they look good?

[The Piper]

Sure, the line is up again in the template (http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/forums/show.php?pg=test), which looks exactly like the whoareyou template, except that everyone could technically see it.

I still get a blank page with only "mySQL error:No Database Selected" on it.

I also double-checked the default webqueries and they seem ok, just like you said.

I'm really clueless about this. The weird thing is that the first time I installed WebTemplates, just after installing vB for the first time and testing it for a while, it seemed to work fine...

Thanks anyway for your help and support!
Paulo

[Logician]

piper, it seems that something is wrong with "webtemplatequery" table. The installation may not be successfully completed for some reason or the table may become corrupted later. So let's check this:

First get this script, edit the first few lines and upload it to your server: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...threadid=38262 (If you dont have any tool to run SQL queries). Then run the script and run this query:

select id,name,query,noresulttext,tablerow from webtemplatequery order by id;

Tell me what it returns back, if any..If it returns that table is corrupted, apply this command:

REPAIR TABLE webtemplatequery;

If it says table does not exist, run installation script one more time..

[The Piper]

Logician, here's a screenshot of what came up after I installed logician_query.php and ran that query.

I also did repair the table, although it didn't seem to be corrupted, but it didn't do any good, I still get that error.

Thanks a lot for your support, and sorry to be bugging you with this...

Paulo

[Logician]

Hey everybody,

Good news: I am planning to work more on WebTemplates hack and release a new (non-BETA) version with improvements. If you are using the hack, I want to hear your requests about the hack. I cant promise I can meet all requests but they are welcomed.

What I've already planed is:

* Small bug fix that gave The Piper some bad time. If you have more than 1 databases in your server, hack refuses to work with WebQueries. This will be fixed.

* WebTemplate visits will be nicely displayed in Who is Online like:
"UserX viewing WebTemplate: XXXX".

* Date fields returned from WebQueries will be formatted according to visitor's time settings. So you can display them in your webtemplates too..

* Texts in board messages, private messages and calender events will be parsed properly. So all smilies//bb code etc, will be displayed as your board displays them and you can use them in your webtemplates too..

If you have any other ideas, feature requests, feel free to share, thank you..

BTW. if you use this hack and didnt click install yet, please do! I really want to know how many people use this hack. This helps a lot to me to decide if I'll work on this hack more and improve it..

Regards,
Logician