vB Assistant

Name: vB Assistant
Version: 1.1
templates to edit: 1 - 2

Description: vB Assistant is like a mini cpanel for your members, it small yet contains lots of information.

It will help you get to things much faster in a organized fashion. It will tell you all you need to know about your private messages, How many you have, how many in total, and show you the newest one in detail. It will show you the name of the person that sent it, the link directly to the PM (no hassle with going to inBox first), When you get a new PM within 24 hours It'll let you know with a flashing image and a "Received Today!" caption.

After the message ages (24 hours has past) it'll show the date instead. vB Assistant uses all your current forum settings, from date format, to forum title name.

vB Assistant will also let you know when a thread you started has a new reply which you haven't read. You will see a "View Replies" when someone posts in your thread. It will also tell you who the poster is, without even visiting the thread! It checks when was your last visit and determines if you read it or not. It wasn't easy since there isn't a "message unread" column in the database, so i managed to use the last login time.

vB Assistant has a mini quick search box, just type and hit enter.

When a user is not registered and he/she views vB Assistant, it will let them know what feature they have access to, and also tell them to register to get access to those features. (PM, cpanel links, etc...).

The buddie list is also available, clicking the username takes you to the PM window, clicking the red X will remove the buddie.

Each section in vB Assistant has a expandable/collapsible switch, If you do not want to see a part of it just click and it folds away with cool javascript affect

By having expandable/collapsible sections vB Assistant becomes even more compact and organized.

vB Assistant will also refresh every two minutes by default, it can be changed if wanted.

I see vB Assistant as a mini messenger that you can keep open (since it's small) while you browse the 'net

There is also a mini statistics section that will show you some information about how many registered members, users online, total post, etc...

Plus it will keep track of how many posts were made in the last 24 hrs.

Anyway, you get the idea.


Installation:

Very easy: Instructions are attached.
couple variables to edit, couple templates and your done.

Other information:

I wasn't going to release this yet, because i wanted to add more features, and remove anything that i later find unnecessary, But I am releasing in hope that i can get some ideas from you people on improving it.

If you find any bugs let me know and i will fix them. I have tested it many times. And have been using it for a couple days.

It should work with vbulletin version 2.x.x. I've tested it on 2.2.9 and 2.3.0

Please lick install if you find this useful

Updates:
March 30th: New version 1.1 Released.
Changes:

- Added: a PM Meter, shows percentage of how full inBox is
- Added: a preview of the private message, will show 75 characters of the message.,
- Added: 5 new images, for Meter.
- Fixed: PM Meter disappears when you have 1 new message to make space for the PM preview, Meter returns once the PM is read.

April 1st:

- Fixed bug: PM would show 1% full inBox when you had no PM's, now shows 0% when you have no messages in inBox

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To upgrade simply re-upload assistant.php and overwrite. Edit new configuration settings.

Clear browser cache first to download the update.

[ahbao]

is the templete style out yet?

[Dark Shogun]

Sorry to bring back a pretty dead thread but does ANYONE know how I can make the vB Assistant to automatically popup when someone goes to the homepage instead of having to click on it? Also is there a way to make it refresh automatically?

Dark Shogun

[Kaelon]

So, my vB Assistant seems to take around 20-30 seconds to load up, as well. I have a very active forum, around a million posts and some 12,000 users; we're on a top of the line dedicated system with 2 gigs of RAM. I hardly think that this is a hardware issue. I've reviewed the code though, and aside from heavy querying, I don't see why it should take so long to load. Any ideas on why it's taking long?

[Kaelon]

Bug (confirmed), in that vB Assistant cannot handle usernames with apostrophes or special characters, and uses malformed queries:

Invalid SQL: SELECT COUNT(*) AS threads FROM thread WHERE postuserid = '12392' AND visible = '1' AND lastpost > '1074904556' AND lastposter != 'Euclides Ti'ran' ORDER BY dateline DESC LIMIT 0,1
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ran' ORDER BY dateline DESC LIMIT 0,1' at line 1

[ricker]

this works great, except for that fact that the message preview doens't show up. it just says:

You have 1 new messages.
12 are old messages.

And there is no link to go to your PMs.

I also can't get any of the sections to collapse, could this be due to the fact that I'm on a mac?