Miscellaneous Hacks - Ultimate Side Columns 2.2

Ultimate Side Columns
By Kerry-Anne www.peterska2.co.uk

Welcome to Ultimate Side Columns 2.2 !

USC 2.2 has now been released!!!!

Introduction

Following the success of the left and right side column modifications, and building on their weaknesses, the Ultimate Side Columns system was born.

Ultimate Side Columns (USC) is your one stop shop for all your side columns needs. It is an easy to configure, all in one solution.

USC 2.0 was born through the evolution and bug fixing of USC 1.0 for vBulletin 3.6 and is for vBulletin 3.7.0 RC1 and later only. It is not supported with earlier versions and may not work with them.

Features

USC 2.0 is fully customizable, can use conditions and variables (not available in USC 1.0), has greater flexibility in where it can be omitted from (after requests received), and contains new functionality of both independently collapsible columns and user defined custom links to be displayed on a per user basis in the column location of the administrators choosing.

A maximum of 20 blocks spread over the two columns are available at this time. However, if more are required then an expansion pack will be provided. The blocks can be reordered and moved between the templates with ease through simple template edits.

USC 2.2 Change Log:
Fixed bug with profile.php?do=editattachments
Added All Pages options

USC 2.1 Change Log:
Fixed blank page caused by missing template in the XML
Added compatibility with 3.7.0 Stable/Gold
Manual Template Edit instructions added to package
Enhanced the display page choices to allow exact selection of the pages where USC is to be displayed
Added usergroup permissions in addition to the global options for viewing the left column, viewing the right column, and using the custom contents block.

USC 2.1 has additional files. You need to upload the files first BEFORE importing the product

Upgrading from USC 2.0
Upload the contents of the upload folder, except the admincp directory, then import the XML.

Go to vBOptions > USC Options and set the display pages using the new options
Go to Usergroups > Usergroup Manager and set the permissions for each usergroup as desired. By default no permissions are given to any usergroups.

Upgrading from USC 1.0

USC 2.0 has been rewritten from the ground up and therefore all the blocks have been moved from the settings into the templates. Therefore, a unique upgrade script has been provided which must be run before importing the new product. Importing the new product first will result in the loss of your existing USC contents.

The upgrade script is located in the admincp directory after uploading the USC files and is ran by pointing your browser to admincp/usc_upgrade.php

Full upgrade instructions are included in the upgrade readme file in the zip.

Installation Instructions

Download the zip, unzip it and upload the contents of the upload folder to your forum directory. Import the product, all done.

Full instructions are included in the install readme in the zip.

Support

This modification has limited support only and is therefore flagged as unsupported. Support will be given when possible although it is always preferable when users of USC support each other. This was very successful with USC 1.0 and therefore is continued with USC 2.0

If you have any other combinations of pages that you would like to see available for the column options, please post them in the support thread ensuring that you add the title "USC Page Combination Request" to your post, or use this as the first line of your post ensuring that it is in bold text. This is very specific as due to the limited nature of support and time, the support thread will only be quickly skimmed through and therefore requests may be missed if it is not clear what they are.


The screenshots attached to this post and the next one show a range of pages with a range of column combinations. They are not labeled but they are pretty self explanatory.

Enjoy USC 2.0.

Kerry-Anne


PLEASE NOTE: This modification is unsupported. You may not receive a reply right after posting. Please try and help each other out.



Problems with your side columns not showing?
For your side columns to show, you need to update your usergroup permissions from the usergroup manager for each usergroup

Problems with errors in your vBOptions?
Point your browser to admincp/index.php?do=buildbitfields then try again

[Tigratrus]

Originally Posted by canadianrodder

Hi everyone, if you can help, I'd appreciate it. In IE, Opera (but not Firefox or Flock), footer info has jumped under the USC right column. See photo below. Any idea how to fix this? Thanks so much.
VBulletin version is 3.7.3. pl1



Also, for "Speedway": nice work on your site/columns. How do you get the space between column blocks (or is that vbadvanced?). I've tried to no avail...........Frank

Just a general idea... But most of the time when we see something like this displaying differently in IE and FF:

A) It's because IE is a pile of crap (I keed I keed! Well, actually no, IE sucks )

B) More importantly it's possible you've got a glitch in your tags somewhere else in the page. I'd make sure to turn on the "Add Template Name in HTML Comments" in the ACP -> vBulletin Options -> General Settings then run the page in question though the W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/. Turn on all the options so you can see the source etc (and that's why you want the template names in HTML comments, makes it a LOT easier to track down where the problems are.

It's a major PITA, but keep hammering away at it till you get the page to validate and see if that doesn't solve your alignment issue, it prob will.

James and Susan

[Tigratrus]

Originally Posted by griffinzx10

I havent installed this yet, so forgive me if this is in the software, or if this has been answered before.....if i needed to make graphics to put into these blocks, what size do they need to be????

Thanks

Depends on what you want? You determine the base width of the columns in the settings for USC, and if you put larger things (images) in, it will just make the column wider.

James and Susan

[Tigratrus]

Susan figured out a way to do this yesterday. I'll try and get her to write up a series of steps, but the basics of what she did was to use feedburner to grab the RSS feed from vBlog, then used feedburner's buzzboost to generate a code snippet that could be dropped into a USC block.

She did some tweaking of the layout via css on our site, but it WORKS!

Take a look at our forum for a an example of how it looks.

James and Susan

[speedway]

Originally Posted by canadianrodder

Also, for "Speedway": nice work on your site/columns. How do you get the space between column blocks (or is that vbadvanced?). I've tried to no avail...........Frank

Hi Frank

I am not using USC anymore, that is infact VBAdvanced which is a temporary measure. I am eventually going vbDrupal/Drupal once I get things all working correctly.

Cheers
Bruce

[canadianrodder]

Tigratrus, thanks. when you say:

B) More importantly it's possible you've got a glitch in your tags somewhere else in the page. I'd make sure to turn on the "Add Template Name in HTML Comments" in the ACP -> vBulletin Options -> General Settings then run the page in question though the W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/. Turn on all the options so you can see the source etc (and that's why you want the template names in HTML comments, makes it a LOT easier to track down where the problems are.

Specifically, run the page through the validator, what "page". This happens to be the forum home page...............Frank

[Tigratrus]

Originally Posted by canadianrodder

Tigratrus, thanks. when you say:
Specifically, run the page through the validator, what "page". This happens to be the forum home page...............Frank

So navigate to your forum home copy the url from your browser, and paste it into the W3C validator and click the button to tell it to validate.

If you haven't done this before, be aware that fixing the validation errors can be a major pain, it'll probably take a lot of digging though templates, and it's not something anyone can advise you on via a thread, way to many variables. If you're not comfortable using Firefox+Firebug and reading though the errors, you might want to see if you can find a coder that's willing to help.

If you have the basic background and/or are willing to spend some time on it, it's really just a matter of keeping at it till you find the source of the problems. In general you want to try and fix the earliest errors first, as you generally get cascade errors where a badly formed tag causes a whole series of errors below it. Ads are also a MAJOR source of validation errors, they often have & in them instead of the proper escape sequence of: & (don't forget the ; at the end either!). Good luck!

James and Susan

[canadianrodder]

Tigratrus, found the error after validating. I had made a typo in closing the table tag. Duh. Also found a bunch of other stuff that I'll have a look at - not stuff that I had touched.

Thanks.

Speedway, thanks for replying.

[Tigratrus]

Gratz!

It's a handy tool... And it's amazing how few sites (even really big ones) bother to check that their pages validate.

James and Susan

[trigatch4]

Just throwing it out there again:

Are there any sample code snippets of cool things to put in these sidebars? Display random members? Display top posters this month? Etc... with avatars?

[petacat]

I did a search through the thread and could not see this mentioned...

Only think this mod needs now is to conditionally enable left and right columns per style.

Some styles have a column built in (often with the login there).

It would be nice!

PS: I think a lot of the problems people have with getting the columns to show in non-standard styles might be resolved by trying different positions under the Column start point option... It was useful to me anyway.