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]

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by markp_2000

It is complaining about not have the php5-gd library at 2.0.36 or higher. I have verified that it is. Will the mod work with this complaint? It made the sprites in the directory.

Mark

People in past versions with earlier gd libraries had screwed up sprites for any icons that were grayscale. So if none of your icons are grayscale, I think you should be in good shape.

Beyond the current bug where thread sprites aren't showing up, everything else should work.

[markp_2000]

Originally Posted by Crotan

People in past versions with earlier gd libraries had screwed up sprites for any icons that were grayscale. So if none of your icons are grayscale, I think you should be in good shape.

Beyond the current bug where thread sprites aren't showing up, everything else should work.

Thanks, I examined all of the sprites last night and they all look fine (no greyscale).

Mark

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by sivaganeshk

Why is this not built on official vb 4.1.12 ?

Using sprites, are not easy for the average user to actually modify the images and change things.

We didn't think it was something we wanted to push in vB4 at the time of release (3 years ago almost now).

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by Zachery

Using sprites, are not easy for the average user to actually modify the images and change things.

We didn't think it was something we wanted to push in vB4 at the time of release (3 years ago almost now).

Hopefully that view has changed now? Is there a better tracker item to upvote for CSS sprites than

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/...3Aall-tabpanel

[bilgicc]

Originally Posted by Zachery

Using sprites, are not easy for the average user to actually modify the images and change things.

We didn't think it was something we wanted to push in vB4 at the time of release (3 years ago almost now).

I think, that may be offered as an option. Who want to use sprites plugin, active it on plugin & product.

[MikaN]

Originally Posted by sarangan

Now thread icons are not showing.. Still need another fix.

You can probably fix this manually.

Edit threadbit - template

It begins with:

<li class="threadbit {vb:raw thread.statusstring}<vb:if condition="$show['paperclip']">....

Add "sprite_statusicon_thread_30" (without quotes) in front of that threadbit string.. so that it looks like this:

<li class="sprite_statusicon_thread_30 threadbit {vb:raw thread.statusstring}<vb:if condition="$show['paperclip']">...

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by MikaN

You can probably fix this manually.

Edit threadbit - template

It begins with:

<li class="threadbit {vb:raw thread.statusstring}<vb:if condition="$show['paperclip']">....

Add "sprite_statusicon_thread_30" (without quotes) in front of that threadbit string.. so that it looks like this:

<li class="sprite_statusicon_thread_30 threadbit {vb:raw thread.statusstring}<vb:if condition="$show['paperclip']">...

That will fix it, but for some reason the template modification ceased automatically applying this change after vb 4.1.11

[fly]

Originally Posted by Crotan

That will fix it, but for some reason the template modification ceased automatically applying this change after vb 4.1.11

Well, if the template changed, can't you just modify the search and replace for it in TMS?

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by fly

Well, if the template changed, can't you just modify the search and replace for it in TMS?

I think that will be the better solution, but ultimately this addon needs to be updated for the same for it to be fully compatible with vb 4.1.11+ otherwise every user, who downloads and installs will have to do it

[MikaN]

Yes, that's a "quick fix" because for some reason even though that particular modification line is active its status is not checked so it's not applied and I couldn't find a reason for that.

ps. there's another similar thing with search_threadbit template. That string is active, but status is not checked -> doesn't work which means that getdaily results are missing that status icon also.

An another one: memberaction_dropdown:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=498

Edit: as fly said it above .. the reason is obvious - if the original template has changed TMS can't modify that template because the search string doesn't match (sorry if this conclusion is obvious I'm just learning how TMS and this mod works ).

So I guess, somebody needs to update this mod to be fully compatible with the latest vB - remember... keeping vB "up-to-date" is important for security reasons. vBulletin should make this mod a core feature.