vBadvanced Homepage

Official Support Forums
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.

[Blackbeard]

This is a great hack, thanks alot, was just woundering if you could sort me out, iam missing a few images and as far as i know they are all in the correct place, can someone take a quick look at my page then point out what i must do.

http://learnall-forum.com

[Blackbeard]

When i change the image folder to forums/images i nolonger get images on my forum but ok on portal page

[Rids]

Installed and working nicely although it took longer than anticipated due to me leaving a dot in the path (instructions are not idiot proof ) - very nice hack!

[danbc]

I have a problem, dunno what I did wrong...

When I run the adv_index.php file, the different boxes seem to work, but the middlesection is not there...


Here?s a sg...



Anyone got an idea what I did wrong, or am missing to do?


Thanks,

Dan

[jeff225]

Rids, I did the same thing. I left the period in the forums direct path in the config.php file and it took me about an hour to find the proplem.

Dan,
Make sure you set up a forum called news and a forum called polls and place a test thread in each one. Also make sure that the news and poll forum ID number is placed in your advanced home options page.

I also have one question, when you install the hack it gives you the option to set the correct URL to your image folders. I need to change the url path again because my news icons(icons.icon1.gif) are not displaying correctly. Where do I change this path at?

**Update - Thanks Tigga, I changed the path on options>thread display options and it works.

[Symbian.info]

How can I change it so that people can see the attached pictures on the news o the portal? So not a link but seen on the news complete!?

[Tigga]

Texas & Snowbot - The script uses vBulletin's default navbar, so if you wanted to add a link to the forums there it would need to be added to your navbar template. If you only wanted the link to be displayed on your homepage you could add an if condition like this around the code for the link.
<if condition="$index_header">
(Kind of a cheap way to do it, but it works )

Blackbeard - You have to change the image paths to /forums/images

Dan - As Jeff said, you have to create a news forum and make a post in there before the newsbits will work.

Jeff - If you're talking about the default icon that is displayed if no icon is selected, that's listed in your main vBulletin options => Thread Display Options => Show Default Post Icon. Did you change the path at all during that part of the install? The script *should* be able to determine the correct path and update that for you in most cases, so I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a problem with that part.

Symbian - Currently it will display the thumbnail of an image if you have image resizing turned on. Otherwise it displays a link to the file/image. If you wanted to change that you would need to modify the file and remove all of the code for the attachments except for the part that actually displays the images. If that was done though, you wouldn't be able to attach files other than image files in your news posts.

[danbc]

Stupid me, wrote the wrong ID number for the news forum, everything is working like a charm now

Thanks for the help guys!

[NuclioN]

A request. How about a custom block to your newsforum as links and when you click on them they not only display the news but under that a react system where reply's kan be added so...you have a newsitem and under it a display of instant reactions.

[Tigga]

Dan - Glad you got it figured out. Hope you enjoy the script.

Nuclion - I'm not sure I completely follow you here... Are you basically saying you want to display the replies to a news post under that post on the homepage?