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vBadvanced Homepage v1.1 Released! (01.27.04)

vBadvanced Homepage is an advanced homepage / portal that will allow you to include different options from your vBulletin message board on your site's homepage. It also allows you to easily create and manage new pages which are completely powered by vBulletin and vBadvanced. There are over 40 options where you can enable/disable the features, plus everything is template based so it is very easy to customize and change everything through your Admin CP.



Features:

• Login box for members to log in to your site on the homepage.
• Post News in a forum you specify and have it appear on your homepage.
• Create new pages in which the content will replace the news section of your homepage.
• Show the latest threads started in your forum on your homepage.
• Show a poll and allow users to vote and see the results on your homepage.
• Shows users avatar, new private messages, and buddy list for members who are logged in.
• Shows a list of active users.
• Shows statistics such as total members, threads, posts, top poster, newest member, and today's birthday's.
• Shows a mini calendar with links to days with scheduled events, and a box with today's scheduled events.
• Search box to allow users to quickly search your forums.
• Set and change all options via the Admin CP.
• Ability to easily switch on/off the polls, users avatar, buddy list, online users, search box, calendar, custom templates, news icons, news comments, smilies, set the maximum number of news posts, and many other options via the Admin CP.
• Everything is completely template based so it is very easy to customize.
• Install file that will make all database queries and templates for you in seconds.
• Uninstalls in seconds.
• Tested and stable with vBulletin 3.0 RC.
• 100% validated XHTML 1.0 compliance
  

A nice feature of vBadvanced Homepage is that it is optimized and designed for large web sites. vBadvanced Homepage performs only 5 queries with all the options turned off. Some options will cause the script to perform extra queries, but even with all the options turned on it still performs only 17 queries at max.

Here is a list of each extra function that will cause extra queries:

• News - 1 query
• Latest Threads - 1 query
• Poll - 1 query (2 if the user has voted)
• User's Avatar - 1 query
• Buddy List and/or Online Users - 1 query
• Mini Calendar - 3 queries (none for the simple calendar)
• Stats - 2 queries
• New Posts - 1 query

Screen Shots:
Admin Homepage
Guest Homepage
Admin CP Options

Example Sites:
http://vbadvanced.com
http://plurplanet.com
http://digitalkore.net
http://differentdawn.com

Updates From v1.01 to v1.1

• News Archive where you can display links and info about older news posts.
• Online usere & buddylist now show "Username HTML Markup".
• Shows subscribed threads in news, news archive, and latest threads.
• Preivew on Latest threads and news archive (similar to the preview on forumdisplay).
• Option to display what forum(s) the latest threads were posted in.
• Poll icon in the latest threads section for threads which contain polls.
• New option to change the date/time format for news posts.
• Support for left/right text direction and languages.
• All known bugs from v1.01 have been fixed.

There are 7 new options in your Admin CP which include:

• News Date & Time Format (Allows you to change the date/time format for news posts)
• Show News Subscribed Threads (Shows the "subscribed" icon in the news posts if a user is subscribed to that post)
• Number of Archived News Posts to Display (Allows you to set the number of archived news posts you would like to display)
• Show Preview in Archive? (Similar to the thread preview, shows a preview of the threads in the News Arcive section)
• Show Subscribed Icon? (Shows the "subscribed" icon in the latest threads section for users that are subscribed to that thread)
• Show Preview of New Threads? (Similar to the thread preview option for the forumdisplay page, it shows you a preview of the thread)
• Show Latest Threads Forum? (Shows a link to, and the name of the forum the thread is in)

Most every template has changed as well, so it may be necessary to revert your templates and re-apply any chnages you have made.


Help & Support:
Before asking for support, Please read the F.A.Q in the readme file! If you have any problems or questions that are not covered in the F.A.Q. please here, or please check out vBadvanced.com for priority support. I will be more than happy to help in any way I can if the request for help is made there. Anyone trying to contact me via email, private message, or any other means will be ignored.

Copyright:
This script is ? 2003 - 2004 vBadvanced.com and PlurPlanet, LLC.
This hack is NOT to be re-distributed in any way or placed on a website for download without permission.
All copyright notes in the script itself must remain unchanged.


Thanks To:
Faranth & Littlebit for helping test the beta versions and hopefully squashing most of the bugs.

[tgmorris]

Originally Posted by CdaKnight

Hi, I am having a cookie problem. Logging in from the main page (so the welcome panel works) doesn't work. :\

I went through the template (the main one), and set all form references to be on the $vboptions[bburl] (or equivillant variable... I don't remember what its called).

My forum is a vB 3 RC2, and installed on a sub domain. My Cookie path is '/' w/o the single quotes, and my cookie domain is blank. vB told me to put these settings in, although they ahve been causing more problems than they've solved...

Any ideas on why the login won't work?

Try changing the reference to md5.js in the index template to vbulletin_md5.js and see if that solves the problem. You may also try it without the login panel and use the navbar to see if the problem disappears.

[Alone Wolf]

Originally Posted by Faranth

yes i belive it just needs moving ^^

Alonewolf, if youd like a link on the front page that ONLY shows on the front page, but on the forums it shows a link back to the front page

try this

open adv_index.php

find

PHP Code:

define('NO_REGISTER_GLOBALS', 1); 


add

PHP Code:

under define('THIS_SCRIPT', 'adindex'); 


open your navbar and find

<!-- nav buttons bar -->
<div align="center">
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" align="center" style="border-top-width:0px">
<tr align="center">

add under

<td class="vbmenu_control"><if condition="THIS_SCRIPT == adindex"><a href="link to forum"> Forums </a><else /><a href="link to index page"> Index </a></if>

Thanks you very much. Now I can know what to do futher more. I enjoy doing myself but sometimes, I got stuck. ^_^.
Thanks again!

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by Alone Wolf

Thanks you very much. Now I can know what to do futher more. I enjoy doing myself but sometimes, I got stuck. ^_^.
Thanks again!

glad that works

[RobAC]

Originally Posted by RobAC

Is it possible to get the latest forum topics in a center block rather than a side block?

Originally Posted by Faranth

yes i belive it just needs moving ^^

What just needs moving??

[alzibub]

Hi,

Great Hack !!
I installed no issues and setup seemed straight forward for a newish hacker - so thanks !

Only one slight issue - used your latest version of the file - running a clean install of VB3 RC2 in a subdirectory...

Everything fine except the smiles from the news article are missing - I check the path and it misses the fact it is in a subfolder....
All other images are fine - I have tried entering in the full URL path to the images/smiles folder - I have also tried the relative UNIX path - but alas the smiles show in the forum but not in the adv_index page....

Any idea's much appreciated - I have checked and re-checked paths...

Also noticed the footer links on adv_index for admin and mod panels were incorrect - but contact us ect fine - I manually changed the paths in the index/footer template in admin to resolve this - not sure if that is a bug or not ?

Cheers in advance for any offerings of support and help - Great/fantastic Hack all the same !!

[Tigga]

snakes1100 - The buddylist problem is something I haven't heard of before... Does it display the duplicate names on the online users part as well (assuming you have that enabled)? They both use the same query and method to display things, so I would *think* that if there was an issue that it would be present there too. Have any of your other members mentioned the problem? Can you post here or PM me with a link to your site so I can have a look?

RobAC - Just copy the HTML code for the latest threads part and put it in the center table cell, either above or below the $newsbits variable.

alzibub - The install file *should* have modified all of your image paths for you. Did the script show any images that it wasn't able to find the correct path for? Can you post a link to your site here so I can take a look?

[alzibub]

Originally Posted by Tigga

alzibub - The install file *should* have modified all of your image paths for you. Did the script show any images that it wasn't able to find the correct path for? Can you post a link to your site here so I can take a look?

Thanks for the quick response !
From what I can remeber of the install - it seemed to find all images - but i was kinda doing the scan quick RTFM.... :surprised:

Ok - as requested - link

Massive thanks in advance
Alz

[Tigga]

Well right now the path to your smilies is pointed to "images/smilies". That would need to be changed to "/hogwarts2/forums/images/smilies" to work.

[alzibub]

Thanks for that...

Edited path for smiles and post icons as above - all working great !
Cheers for your time and also a great Hack !!!

[Cyricx]

erm, wrong thread, LOL