WebTemplates 2.x: VB Integrated Content Management System

After a long wait, here is the new 2.x version of Webtemplates. First a short introduction for users who are not familiar with the old version:

This hack is a vbulletin integrated content management system. Term "Webtemplates" stands for dynamic webpages that reside in your MYSQL database and administered inside your vbulletin admin control panel. But they are more than regular site pages because they can automatically inherit visual design of your forum, can apply permissions according to your vb usergroup settings, can keep track of page counts, last visitorname/visit time, display page browsers in the page itself and in your whoisonline page etc. So basically webtemplates are dynamic web pages of your site which are powered by vbulletin.


WEBTEMPLATES 2.x FEATURES:
([New] indicates feature that is recently introduced in this 2.x version)

• Easy Installation : Webtemplates can be installed to your board without hacking even a single vbulletin file! It is coded as an add-on, not a hack.
• Conditionals : Webtemplates has built-in support for Logician's advanced templates conditionals so you can design webtemplates which change their display under different conditions. (Even if you don't have that hack installed)
• Private Webtemplates (NEW): With 1 click you can make a webtemplate "private" and it will be displayed to only certain usergroups.
• Apply VB Permissions: You can ban any webtemplate to any user or usergroup according to their userids or usergroupids. So for instance you can design a webtemplate which only members can see while guests can not or only user A can not see etc.
• Draft Webtemplates (NEW): You can put webtemplates in "draft" mode which makes them invisible to all but admins.
• Visitor Logging&Tracking (NEW): You can track certain users (by usergroup or userid) to monitor who visited a webtemplate and when. This is configurable per webtemplate basis.
• Site Contributers (Editor) Support (NEW): You can grant editing permissions for certain users or usergroups for your webtemplates individually and they will be able to update these webtemplates using their own editor interface.
• Categories (NEW): Webtemplates 2.x supports multi-categories for better webtemplate organizations.
• Multi Parsing (NEW): Webtemplates can now parse PHP or HTML or TEXT (=smilie/img tags/bbcode parsing like vb posts)
• Default variables : You can use/display certain variables in your webtemplates like username of the visitor, visitor email address, last visit time, page creation time, page last edit time, Last visitor name, last visit time etc.
• Outside Variables (NEW): Advanced users can now use outside variables in webtemplates, then webtemplates will accept/use/process user sent variables via HTTP_GET and HTTP_POST methods (eg. a HTML form can post to a webtemplate with this feature)
• Page Counter : Webtemplate has built-in counter and you can display page count to your visitors and you can edit it or turn it OFF or ON per webtemplate basis.
• Page Browsers Display (NEW): Webtemplates can display who is browsing that webtemplate while people is reading them (like default forum browse display of vbulletin)
• Who is Online Display (NEW): Webtemplates can display page visitors in who is online (This is Optional and require a simple hacking in file online.php). You can create private webtemplates which are hidden in who is online too.
• Theme Support (NEW): Webtemplates support "themes" which are parent webtemplates which include child webtemplates in them. For instance if you have 20 similiar pages which uses the same visual look, you can make a theme for them, then just insert their content into this theme. If you change theme later, all 20 pages' visual will change automatically.
• Header/Footer Inclusion : Webtemplates can use headers/footers (your default vb header/footer or custom ones)
• PHPINCLUDE per webtemplate (NEW) : Every webtemplate has its own "phpinclude" field which you can run PHP codes before loading the Webtemplate
• Help Documents : The script comes with built-in & detailed help documents (they are webtemplates too).
• Webquery Feature : With advanced "webquery" feature you can now add create dynamic webtemplates which include database query results. For instance you can easily add member count/post count/thread count/last 10 threads forum X etc. to your webtemplates with default webqueries that comes with installation or you can create your custom webqueries with basic SQL knowledge.
• Archieve to Text File (NEW): Webtemplates/Webqueries can be downloaded to a text file with one click for archiving purposes. You can also easily share these text files with other hack users.
• Login/Logout box (NEW): You can insert login/register box to your webtemplate if visitor is a guest and log off box if she is a member.
• Admin Panel in Webtemplates (NEW): Your webtemplates can include an "admin panel" displayed to only admins and by using them you can access many details and stats of your page while you are browsing them.
• Better Performance (NEW): Webtemplates 2.x structured so that it performs well even under heavy load conditions and high traffic servers. (See Performance issues below)
• Easy Back up: Simply back up your database (inside vbulletin or externally) and all your webtemplate structure is also backed up automatically.

For screenshots, FAQ, performance issues, migration from old version to new version, see below.

If you use the hack, clicking here will make sure you'll know about updates&bug fixes. It will also help me understand how many people is using the hack so please click the install button if you use it. Thank you..


Version Updates:
30.July.2003 - > Version 2.03

* Adds feature to include regular vbtemplates into webtemplates

2.02 users: apply this fix to update.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.

12.July.2003 - > Version 2.02

* Fixes a bug with outside variables.

2.01 users: apply this fix to update.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.

2.July.2003 - > Version 2.01

* Fixes bug that bothers webqueries if "Show Template Name" option enabled in vb admin cp
* Fixes bug in webquery $WQ_mostactivemembers
* Fixes visual look of webtemplate test
* Fixes visual look of admin panel and makes sure it looks ok in dark backgrounded boards too.

2.00 users: update here.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.


Webtemplates 3.x (for vb.3.x) is released here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=76422

[Logician]

2.July.2003 - > Version 2.1

Version History:
* Fixes bug that bothers webqueries if "Show Template Name" option enabled in vb admin cp
* Fixes bug in webquery $WQ_mostactivemembers
* Fixes visual look of webtemplate test
* Fixes visual look of admin panel and makes sure it looks ok in dark backgrounded boards too.

2.0 users: Use the attached document to upgrade to 2.1
New Users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.

[Intex]

Logician - thx for all your testing today. That's certainly fixed my problems.

Fantastic job for such a cool hack !!! .

[high]* Intex cilcks install.[/high]

[reismarktq2]

Logician: I have had a request from one of my administrators for a feature that would allow us to set the style to be used with the templates regardless of which style the user has selected for his profile. This is because the pages we are converting into WebTemplates will not display aesthetically properly in certain existing styles, and it's too much work to convert the pages to display properly with all styles. I hope this isn't too difficult to pull off... can you help?

[Logician]

Today at 04:53 AM reismarktq2 said this in Post #43
Logician: I have had a request from one of my administrators for a feature that would allow us to set the style to be used with the templates regardless of which style the user has selected for his profile. This is because the pages we are converting into WebTemplates will not display aesthetically properly in certain existing styles, and it's too much work to convert the pages to display properly with all styles. I hope this isn't too difficult to pull off... can you help?

If you want to force the webtemplate's look, why don't you depend on vb styles? Even if it is a style in your board you want to apply, just apply it via HTML. In other words instead of using:
<normaltext>Hello</normaltext>
use:
<font face="Times New Roman" color="#FF0000" size="4">Hello</font>

So user's style will not matter.

It is not easy to force a vb style in webtemplates because style issue in vbulletin is not handled in the relevant .php file, but in global.php which runs before everything else. It runs before webtemplate's view.php script too, so webtemplates just gets the style id from it. To change this behaviour either webtemplate need to reform the style in view.php (which means additional queries in every webtemplates) or global.php should be hacked so that if requested script is view.php, style behavior will change.

Thus my suggestion seems the easiest solution.

[Intex]

Logician - in version 1 of your hack you had a query that showed the person's last 10 threads they'd created. I tried creating a new query based on the old info, but didn't have much luck. Could you let me know how that is achieved?

It would be also nice if you or any others could share some of the queries for us newbies .

Thanks

[Gryphon]

On php 4.0.6 I had to change all instances of array_key_exists to key_exists.

[Logician]

Today at 05:56 PM Intex said this in Post #45
Logician - in version 1 of your hack you had a query that showed the person's last 10 threads they'd created. I tried creating a new query based on the old info, but didn't have much luck. Could you let me know how that is achieved?

It would be also nice if you or any others could share some of the queries for us newbies .

Thanks

[Intex]

You're a star . Thanks.

[Intex]

Logician - Without wishing to monopolise your time - is there any way to show the friendly template name when display it on who's online rather than the template name?

BTW: this hack is amazing - I've converted shed loads of my pages over today. Can't understand why others aren't upgrading.

[Logician]

Today at 12:16 AM Intex said this in Post #49
Logician - Without wishing to monopolise your time - is there any way to show the friendly template name when display it on who's online rather than the template name?

it would be better this way but structure is not designed this way as it requires additional queries in who is online.php.

Who is online page is getting "unfriendly" template name from the visitors url without quering the database however if we add friendly template name there, it needs to query webtemplate table for each webtemplate.

So not a performance friendly way.. :glasses: