vBadvanced Homepage

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vBadvanced.com is now open! There you will find more information regarding vBadvanced Homepage, FAQ's, hacks & modifications, and more.


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.

[Tigga]

Snowbot - Try uploading an un-hacked version of functions_calendar.php into your forum/includes folder and see if that makes a difference. That will add the arrows back and make the calendar slightly wider than the rest of the blocks, but you should try that to test and see if it's a problem with the file, or if you are somehow missing the calendar phrases.

The Quibbler - To add more custom blocks, just copy the content from one of the other custom blocks and then paste it into your index template where you would like it to appear.

[The Quibbler]

I guess I do have one other problem with it that I just discovered. I made a new template called 'index_links', to try making a page for the site; when I go to adv_index.php?page=links, I get this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: parse_bbcode() in /home/quibbler/public_html/adv_index.php on line 553

[Tigga]

Ahh, good find... If you'll look in your adv_index.php file for this line of code:

include('./includes/functions_bbcodeparse.php');

Remove that and paste it right below this line instead:

require_once('./global.php');

That should fix the problem.

[The Quibbler]

Ah, that fixed it

One last question: if I was going to link to a page of content in a side block, what would I link to? Just "?page=links"? That's what I do for my current non-vbulletin home page; it's got a similar content system. But with vB, if someone came to adv_index.php?referrerid=1, wouldn't going to ?page=links and taking off the ?referrerid=1 cause the referrer to not get the credit if they register later?

Or is that not how it works?

[SnowBot]

Originally Posted by Tigga

Snowbot - Try uploading an un-hacked version of functions_calendar.php into your forum/includes folder and see if that makes a difference. That will add the arrows back and make the calendar slightly wider than the rest of the blocks, but you should try that to test and see if it's a problem with the file, or if you are somehow missing the calendar phrases.

That fixed it but like you say its abit wide now, wonder what i did wrong ?

[SnowBot]

In the install file it says


Find:
function construct_calendar_output($today, $usertoday, $calendarinfo, $fullcalendar = 0, $weekrange = '')
{
global $birthdaycache, $eventcache, $bbuserinfo, $vbphrase, $stylevar;

Replace it with:
function construct_calendar_output($today, $usertoday, $calendarinfo, $fullcalendar = 0, $weekrange = '', $dontshowweek = '0')
{
global $birthdaycache, $eventcache, $bbuserinfo, $vbphrase, $stylevar, $vboptions;

But that code isnt there, its now changed to
global $birthdaycache, $eventcache, $bbuserinfo, $vbphrase, $stylevar, $show, $offset, $colspan, $days, $months, $show, $vboptions;

so what do i change the file to now? Can you update the install instructions also so other know?

[SnowBot]

Originally Posted by Tigga

Forkman - Yes, that was the correct place to modify the functions_calendar.php file. Apparently they added some new global variables to that function... Thanks for pointing that out - I just updated the zip.
.

nevermind THANKS

[Tigga]

Quibbler - I'm not quite sure what you mean by the content in side blocks... Could you maybe give me an example of what you're talking about?
I'm honestly not too familiar with the way the referrer system works since that's not something I use. I'm pretty sure though that as long as the visitor uses the link containing "referrerid=X" when they first visit your site that everything will still work. I know a visitor can visit the site, browse threads, and then sign up, so it shouldn't be a problem if they visit other parts as well. It may not hurt to test it out though.

SnowBot - Ok, I figured that was it. I assume you saw that the zip file was updated earlier today, so if you download that and re-apply the file change to functions_calendar.php it should fix the problem.

[Hotte]

great hack,
but i?ve a problem with the calendar :/
as you can see on the attached screenshot, my calendar has 8 columns
I?ve set "Monday" as start of week in vb-options and profile

[The Quibbler]

Tigga - I was talking about using a sideblock to have links to the pages of content, but never mind. It works fine, so I'm not going to make things more complicated by bothering with the "correct" way to do it, as long as it works.