Forum Home Enhancements - [DBTech] InfoPanels v2 (vB5) [AJAX]

DragonByte Technologies are proud to present InfoPanels v2: The most feature-packed Welcome Panel system for vBulletin, and the first Welcome Panel system for vBulletin 5!

Why InfoPanels?

Info Panels is another product from DragonByte Technologies, creators of vBActivity and vBShout. Info Panels allows you to display useful and interesting information in a much more user friendly way, allowing your members to access important areas of the forum, and important information, without having to go through different menu screens.

The Welcome Panel displays all the information your users may want to see instantly when they log on, without having to go searching for it. A handy Module format means you don't have to fiddle with complex code in order to drop it on ANY page, you simply use the Site Manager natively in vBulletin 5!

The Top X Stats portion of the software allows your users to keep track of whats going on in the forum almost in real time - perfect for boards with many forums which are hard to keep track of!

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Complete Feature List

Welcome Panel

• The user's picture with link to the profile where they can edit their User Picture
• New posts and threads since the user's last visit
• Time and date
• # unread PMs (# total PMs)
• Forum Stats: Total Members / Total Threads / Total Posts
• Top Poster with link to their profile, showing number of posts and threads they have
• Own Posts / Threads
• # Posts Per Day (# Posts Today)
• % of forum's total posts
• What forum the user is most active in (# posts and # threads)
• Latest News ticker with fade between news items (settable in vBulletin Options)
• Link to User Settings page

Top X Stats

• Choose "X"
• Disable each individual block
• Set various options per block
• Create new blocks with different options based on each Block Type
• User Stats
  • Newest Members
  • Top Posters
  • Top Thread Starters
• Forum Statistics
  • Newest Replies
  • Most Viewed Threads

Caching

• Fully integrated with vBulletin 5's new Cache functionality using the "Standard" cache type
• Settable Time-To-Live in vBulletin options to balance stale content with resource savings
• "Global" stats such as the Forum Stats in the above list are cached user-agnostic
• Per-user stats like # Posts Per Day are cached per-user

Easy Setup

• A hassle-free Module setup lets you drop the Welcome Panel on literally any page via vBulletin 5's Site Builder!
• Configurable Module title lets you rename the "Welcome Panel" header should you choose
• Fully integrated with the Site Builder under the "Display" grouping

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This mod displays a copyright notification on all pages which includes:

• 1 Link to DragonByte Technologies homepage
• 1 Link to Product Description page of this modification

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by shimei

I have the site in debug right now: https://www.christforums.org/Activity

I legitimately can't figure out how to get to your forum from your Activity page, there doesn't appear to be any links to it


Fillip

[shimei]

Edited

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by shimei

There's a menu and a home link.

I could not find the home link at all when I visited your site

Originally Posted by shimei

I must say, updating your testing environment when a problem presents itself on a new update seemingly would solve a lot of these back and forth issues.

Sure, but please also bear in mind that it takes a long time to update my testing environment every time there's an update, vB5 release a lot of Alpha and Beta versions that should never be used in a production environment or on a live site, and also the fact that as a business it's virtually impossible to make money for vB5.

I hope you, in your professional life, do not rely on a single 3rd party company to make good decisions that enables you to make money improving their product. I have done so in the past (when we tried to make mods for vB5), and it was a nightmare.

If you think it's just me, that I'm the only coder that don't want to deal with vB5, then why not look right here on vB.org?
vB3 add-ons: 1,438
vB4 add-ons: 1,959
vB5 add-ons: 73

If vB5 is a platform that supports modification development, then why would there be so few vB5 mods? Purely in terms of numbers, vB5 has 3.72% of the amount of modifications vB4 has. 5.0.0 Gold was officially released four years ago, on 21 February 2013. Four years to make 73 mods, that's quite the slow rate of development, if you were going to say "but vB4 has been out for longer".

On a more personal note, development for vB5 is needlessly complicated, and I don't like working with the platform. Compared to literally every other platform I have worked with (vB3, vB4, XenForo, Zend Framework, Laravel, Symfony), vB5 is easily the worst in terms of whether I am enjoying my time coding.
I hope you can understand and sympathise; coding isn't just "coding", each platform is almost like its own dialect of a language, and there are some dialects you can understand much more easily than others.

All of that being said, I do understand where you're coming from. You paid for a product and it isn't receiving new feature or bugfix updates except for when new vB5 versions necessitate it. It's also true that even if a new non-beta version of vB5 was released, I would not update my testing environment unless someone reported an issue I couldn't fix by asking enough questions.

I hope I have at least helped you understand why I've not been rushing to update whenever vB5 releases a new Alpha or Beta version. I do still intend to keep supporting the vB5 mods in terms of bugfixing whenever someone reports that a new version has broken the existing functionality.


Fillip

[meissenation]

I just installed vB5 for the first time, upgraded from vb4 and I entirely sympathize with you Fillip. For a decently clean install (used a brand new directory with no vb4 files, just upgraded the database) I'm running into a lot of crap-tastic bugs and issues with vBulletin itself.

For what it's worth, the info panels are working fine for me on 5.2.6.

[shimei]

Edited

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by shimei

Since you acknowledge my position and I hope, now share empathy for my personal matters - how about issuing a refund?

I looked into the details of your purchase, and if you can demonstrate that the product has been 100% unusable for you for all of the 19 months since you purchased the product (meaning, the issue you are experiencing just now has happened ever since day 1 of purchase), I would be happy to grant you a refund

Otherwise, I will unfortunately have to refer to our refund policy that states that once a product has been downloaded, the customer is no longer eligible for a refund.

As always, I'm happy to visit a customer's site to resolve any issues they may be facing, but I prefer to try to ascertain the nature of the problem and fix it before having to resort to asking for login details. I prefer remote debugging because a lot of people are apprehensive about handing out their login details, and handing over login details always carries with it a security risk. Our site, or vB.org, could be hacked the selfsame day as the PM with the details had been sent, thus exposing the customer's site to risk.

That being said, in this case it would seem like the issue is unique to your site, as neither myself nor other customers can replicate the issue. That's the point where I have no choice but to request an FTP and AdminCP account in order to debug this issue further, so if you change your mind I would be happy to look at the problem on-site


Fillip

[shimei]

Edited

[meissenation]

Working perfectly fine for me in 5.2.6. I saw Shim posted about how he customized the CSS, maybe that broke the display.

Attachment 155848

[shimei]

Originally Posted by meissenation

Working perfectly fine for me in 5.2.6. I saw Shim posted about how he customized the CSS, maybe that broke the display.

Attachment 155848

Issue was resolved after having uninstalled the product and reinstalling it.

[meissenation]

Absolutely love this mod and a million thanks to Filip for your work. Is there any way to have a different colored icon for the Top Newest Replies that have unread posts?