Board Optimization - United-Forum CSS Sprites - ludicrous speed - NOW!

tl;dr Makes your forum faster.

Want an easy one-click installation for this addon? . Vote for this jira-entry

Add on currently is in beta stage

When visiting a website, speed is a very important factor not only for users but crawlers as well. Long loading times are a nuisance since your time is basically wasted during the waiting period. Hence, we are trying everything we can in order to speed up our site. One great way to improve loading times is by the use of css sprites. Unfortunately these are not implemented by vBulletin.

We therefore decided to develop our own css-sprite add on for vBulletin boards and want to share this code with the worldwide vBulletin community.

Live demo

The add on is permanently running in our vBulletin board ( > 2.000.000 posts), take a look:
http://www.united-forum.de

The add on will be supported via this thread. If you have any questions, issues, improvements or feedback regarding this add on, please feel free to post a comment or write us a pm at any time. We are happy to discuss

vBulletin performance using css sprites

Our tests are based on version 0.7.0. We used the analytic tools firebug network utility and the googlelabs.com page speed site

on the client side the following parameter were used:
download speed: 5.7 MBit/s
ping: 31ms

css sprites - what are they?

The intention behind css sprites is the bundling of many small graphics into one large graphic in order to decrease the number of required http requests. This shortens the loading times of the given website. In addition, the the accumulated size of all small graphics is higher than the size of the sprite due to reasons of compression.
You can find further information in a great article by Chris Coyier.

What is the gain in using css sprites?

Aside from the technical implementation, the question on how much one actually does gain by using css sprites is of the most interest. Obviously they decrease loading times - but how important are small loading times and what is the impact on vBulletin overall loading times?

A short time ago, Jasper Aguila pointed out that speed is one crucial stickiness factor in his blog on vBulletin.com.

Originally Posted by Jasper Aguila vBulletin Support

The internet has unfortunately contributed to the exponential decrease in attention span for many individuals. That's why this decade is seeing a trend in emerging technologies emphasizing the importance of speed request. It's crucial for your content to be promptly distributed in a timely manner, else bounce rate will increase - making you lose returning visitors. It's also important to note that slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

With better browsers, more powerful processors, and improved technologies constantly releasing each year, it's becoming quite difficult to provide excuses for slow loading pages. Therefore, try optimizing your server for speed. Read up and learn optimization techniques at vBulletin.com's Server Configuration forum.

In addition, the google ranking is influenced by the site speed as well.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Originally Posted by 09.04.2010 - Google Webmaster Central Blog

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

vBseo Webmaster Mert G?k?eimam

CSS sprites is a huge bonus for big boards , any big board owner definately should use it.

Last but not least, not only the user's loading time is reduced, but also does the server load decrease as the server will have to handle a lot less of http requests. This clears available connections and cpu time.

Add on features

In the current released beta version 0.7.2, sprites are available for FORUMHOME and FORUMDISPLAY. Coming up next SHOWTHREAD.

Sprites are created style based for all forum styles and saved in a folder which you can set via the imgdir_sprite stylevar. You have one additional button in the ACP (CSS-Sprites -> Refresh) which automatically creates all sprites, the according css definitions and includes those css definitions in the vBulletin css rollup files.

Installation

First of all, if you didnt want to change the templates manually, install the Template Modification System (TMS). Now proceed with the installation:

• upload the contents of the upload folder into your forum home directory.
• import the add on in the ACP
• upon installation a new stylevar imgdir_sprite will be created. Update this stylevar based on your file structure - default value is the vbulletin sprite directory. Make sure the folder is writable, else the sprites can't be saved!
• create the sprites via the ACP at CSS-Sprite using the Refresh option.
• If you have installed TMS, you are done now. This was an easy gained speed up, not? If you didnt installed TMS and didnt want to do it, proceed with the next point:
• in order to use the sprites, you then will have to edit some templates. The diffs (xou will find it in the do_not_upload folder show which parts you have to delete '<' and which parts to add '>' In addition, on top find the lines in which you will find the respective code.[/b]

[archet1337]

This is a brilliant mod! Thanks for sharing. Working great on 4.1.5

Not that it matters much and is a quick fix, but you forgot to translate the phrase $vbphrase[sprite_navgroup_configuration] to english

Also, the attachment icon looks a bit weird. See attached image. How to fix this?

[FReeSTER]

this mod is great but it gave me a hard time. For some reason it HIDED must of the forum images.

So I Un-Install until I know how to fix it

thanks

[popmyzit]

I am testing this I get error on refresh

Default Style
Error occurred: Your sprite folder is not writeable. Please check the permissions on the directory "".

Where can I modify the directory? What is the default directory so I can make it writable.

thanks

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by popmyzit

I am testing this I get error on refresh

Default Style
Error occurred: Your sprite folder is not writeable. Please check the permissions on the directory "".

Where can I modify the directory? What is the default directory so I can make it writable.

thanks

www.yoursite.com/forums/images/sprites

Folder needs to be 755.

[Osbes]

Hello archet1337,

Originally Posted by archet1337

Also, the attachment icon looks a bit weird. See attached image. How to fix this?

the problem is, that you are not using GD-Libary 2.0.36 (or later) and your image isn't using "color RGBA", but "gray+alpha". You can tell this problem by the vertical lines you get.

GD had a problem handling grayscale images with alpha channel correctly, wich was fixed with GD 2.0.36 in the Year 2007.

GD 2.0.36 (2007-11-xx)
88, Fixed support of PNG grayscale image with alpha channel (Pierre)

https://bitbucket.org/pierrejoye/gd-...361a31aab/NEWS

The solution is to update the GD-Libary to 2.0.36 (or later) or replace every file which uses "gray+alpha" with an version using "color RGBA".

I would advise to update the GD-Libary, cause there is also a serious security problem, that was fixed in the Year 2009 by Debian.

2009

libgd2 (2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-3+lenny1) stable-security; urgency=high

* Non-maintainer upload by the Security Team.
* Fixed CVE-2009-3546: possible buffer overflow or buffer over-read attacks via crafted files (Closes: #552534)

-- Giuseppe Iuculano <iuculano@debian.org> Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:46:06 +0100

I am really shocked by this, since you are now the sixth person with this kind of problem and this fix is 4 years old and since 2 years known als high security fix by debian.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Osbes]

Hello FReeSTER,

what exactly is your problem? i dont understand what you mean.

Best regards
Sebastian

[popmyzit]

Thanks still have an issue with the error above.

Tried also in Vbulletin 3.8:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in [path]/global.php(355) : eval()'d code on line 56

Fatal error: Class 'vB_Template' not found in /home/user/public_html/forum/index.php(596) : eval()'d code on line 157

I don't have time to hack it up for Vbulletin 3.8 but hopefully somebody does.

[Osbes]

Hello popmyzit,

please look into the StyleVar imgdir_sprite. Since your error message just says

Error occurred: Your sprite folder is not writeable. Please check the permissions on the directory "".

Ik looks like this StyleVar is empty on your system, you could use as a value the default sprite folder of vBulletin:

images/sprites

Best regards
Sebastian

[Osbes]

Hello ZeroHour,

i just want to inform you, that i didnt forget your problem, but i didnt have the time to give you a solution at the moment.

Best regards
Sebastian

[popmyzit]

Thanks Sebastian will try the above,

best