vBadvanced Homepage

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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.

[NuclioN]

Yes but not as the reply's in the forum itself, more a very simple reply system maybe even a reply mini bbs as a third party addon that displays short instant reactions on the mainpage. They are only visible when you click a newslink and then a visitor has the option to reply on that specific newsitem.

(seen on fok.nl) www.fok.nl

[jeff225]

Thanks Tigga for the help. It worked fine after I updated the URL on the thread display options.

Does anyone have a procedure for adding more custom blocks? I realize you must update the adv_index.php file but how do you add the custom 3 block to the index_tempates catagory and have it recognize it. Thanks, jeff

[Tigga]

Nuclion - Something like that would be possible, but I don't think it will be a default feature anytime soon.

Jeff - Why not just copy one of the custom templates and then add the code in the index template where you'd like it to appear?

[jeff225]

I can do it that way Tigga but I wanted to keep it organized. I'm integrating your program with other custom databases and I wanted to keep it as organized as possible.

[Tigga]

Ahhh, ok. Well the easiest way to do that would be to look in your adv_index.php file for this code:

PHP Code:

eval('print_output("' . fetch_template('index') . '");'); 


Right above that add:

PHP Code:

eval('$custom3 = "' . fetch_template('index_custom3') . '";'); 


Then create a new template called "index_custom3" and just add $custom3 in your index template. And of course if you need more, you would just change the two places you see the number 3 in that code to 4, 5, and so on.
If you need to add options to turn them on/off, the easiest way would be to put your forum in debug mode for a minute by adding $debug = 1; in your config.php file. Then go to the vBadvanced Homepage settings and add the new settings. If you do that, don't forget to take your board out of debug mode afterwards.

[jeff225]

I'm new to VBulletin so bare with me Tigga but when I select add templates to add the custom 3 template in the admincp it adds it to the custom templates catagory and not under your index templates catagory.

[Tigga]

Yea, it adds them there because they're not "default" templates. It will work just fine from there though... Or if you really need them to be displayed with the others then you can go to your templates table in the database, find that template, and change it's styleid to "-1".

[jeff225]

Awesome, thanks for your help today.

[TECK]

<a href="http://www.plurplanet.com" target="_blank">www.plurplanet.com</a>
You are breaking the vBulletin copyright, simply because you do not display the "vBulletin Copyright ©2000 - 2003, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited" required, on your front page.
Your script uses the vB functions, so is a vBulletin product/hack.

[Tigga]

Jeff - No problem. Hope you enjoy the script.

TECK - I have spoken with a member of the Jelsoft team before and they said it was not necessary to display the copyright message on the homepage, nor any of my other pages, since it is not a vBulletin file. If it was necessary, or a violation of the vBulletin license agreement, then it would be there. [Edited by assassingod - Unnecessary]