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]

[Osbes]

Hello datoneer,

addon will create a new stylevar named imgdir_sprite. If you didnt changed your stylevars until now, the default value (images/sprites) should be ok for you.

Also in most cases this folder is already writeable if this isn't the case or another error occurs, the addon will tell it you during the creation/refresh of the sprites.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Osbes]

Status update:

We have added a lot icons for 0.8.0 but there are still 15 images left which we want to add.

Since we are currently in cologne at the gamescom, there won't be much support until monday and 0.8.0 won't be released before the next weekend.

[datoneer]

How to remove copyright from footer?

[masterweb]

Hello Osbes, i am very interested on this mod and personally i think you did a great job (congratulations for such great solution), but before installing it i have some questions:

I run on my forum the following mods and i would like to ask if there's any known issue between them and yours:

DownloadsII

DownloadsII Create Thread

iTrader

Members who have Visited

More Share Options for VB4 by BOP5

Most popular downloads

SevenSkins Image Resizer

Tabs en vBulletin 4.x

vBSEO

I have disabled the CMS also due as homepage we are running Wordpress with our own Style (you can check it at http://www.onlinewebmarket.net/forum.php)... so from the moment i would avoid installing TMS i have also another question: are you eventually available for installing your mod on my board and editing all templates manually (for a paid fee of course)?.

Thanks in advance for your reply and sorry for boring so much with all these questions Lol.-

[Seductor]

Hi guys, I haven't understood it at all. Do I need to change EVERYTHING that it is shown in TEMPLATE_CHANGES.diff or only the code under the ## Version 0.7.1 ## tag?

Thanks in advance.

[apaydin2148]

but tms is for 3.8.x? is there any version for vb4?

[Mooff]

@masterweb
We are running DownloadsII, Sevenskin Image Resizer, vBseo, v3arcade, vbExperience and there are no conflicts. Most likely there won't be any conflicts with the rest of them either.

@Seductor
Everything in Template_changes.diff needs to be changed. If you are using the TMS those changes will be done automatically during installation.

@apaydin2148
The latest TMS Version does work with vB4. For TMS Support please ask in the TMS mod topic.

Regards Mooff

[K!nG]

Is it working on 4.1.5 ??????

[Seductor]

It works, King.

By the way, Moof, I sugges to add this:

Template: forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost

< <img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_button}/collapse_40b.png" alt="" title="{vb:rawphrase collapse_this_category}" />
---

> (I don't know what It should be here).

[Mooff]

@Seductor

That icon has a javascript attached to it (to collapse the categories). Replacing the icon would mean modifing the javascript aswell, which in this case is pretty ugly, so we won't add that icon.