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]

[Mooff]

You clearly do not have 4000 8-bit grey images on your server.

Aside that won't fix your 'CDN' problem. All it does fix is pictures looking strange in the sprite (in most cases the attachment icon).

[Osbes]

Originally Posted by extreme-gaming

and how exactly am I supposed to do that... I have 4000 images, I need an automated solution if this this is the only work around.

Hello extreme-gaming,

have you this problem with every image? Since this is greyscale format you shouldnt have this issue with colored images, this would be weird/impossible.

I thought you have this problem just with a few images - like everyone else from who i know about this problem - so it would be possible to make it manually.

I didnt have a automatic solution for something like this at my hand (since image conversion is way beyond the scope of this addon), so i can just advise you to search for an solution (maybe based on a different image-library) and share it with us

Best regards
Sebastian

[final kaoss]

Excuse me but you have no idea how many images I have, tyvm.

Originally Posted by Mooff

You clearly do not have 4000 8-bit grey images on your server.

Aside that won't fix your 'CDN' problem. All it does fix is pictures looking strange in the sprite (in most cases the attachment icon).

[Osbes]

Hello extreme-gaming,

if you have the whole directory on a windows based system, you can use a gui with like ifranview with batch conversion to do this automaticlly.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Mooff]

Oh come on, you do not have 4000 8-bit grey images on your server.

Aside, you missed the important part of my post.

This won't fix your CDN problem. I won't. They are not related at all. Not. Nada. None.


edit: I fixed my post. Maybe you will see it now.
edit: dude, this is fun. I linked my fix. Maybe you can link me to show how you use 8-bit greyscale pictures to show colors. Or is your site some black, white and grey paradise?

[final kaoss]

I'll say it again. You have no idea how many images I have, what I use them for etc and so on. You have no idea if and how I choose to modify my images.. You need to learn not to put your nose where it doesn't belong. Let's end this argument now.

edit: I fixed my post. Maybe you will see it now.

Originally Posted by Mooff

Oh come on, you do not have 4000 8-bit grey images on your server.

Aside, you missed the important part of my post.

This won't fix your CDN problem. I won't. They are not related at all. Not. Nada. None.

[Osbes]

Originally Posted by Crotan

Just noticed in the 0.7.1 zip file, the product xml that is included in there is still 0.7.0a, or atleast the version id wasn't updated to reflect the new version.

the separate xml seems to be updated but I just downloaded the zip file since it includes both

Hello Crotan,

thanks for the notice. Fox told me this yesterday on vBGo, this should be fixed since then. I just checked it again, but it seems to be 0.7.1, so i assume that this is fixed.

Best regards
Sebastian

[steeler7]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hello steeler7,

i think you got a typo in your changes.

on your site it reads:

<span class="forumicon sprite_statusicon_1/forum_old_48" id="forum_statusicon_2"></span>

but the "1/" is wrong, it should read

<span class="forumicon sprite_statusicon_forum_old_48" id="forum_statusicon_2"></span>

So please remove the 1/

Best regards
Sebastian

The 1/ is my statusicon folder. I have a bunch of different status icons organized into seperate folders and in the Forums section, editing the Forums, I indicate what folder of Icons I want for that Forum with a XX/ .

Using Firebug it shows all of the missing Icons like you mentioned but with different numbers which are indicating the different folders those images sit in.

Thanks!

[archet1337]

Originally Posted by Osbes

Hello archet1337,

i will make an example for

.highslide-loading {
	background-image: url(graphics/loader.white.gif);

////////////

Best regards
Sebastian

Thank you! I will have a go at it when I get back from work.

Regards,
Archet

[Osbes]

Hello steeler7,

if i understand you correctly you are using folders for the Prefix for Forum Status Images in the AdminCP?

Best regards
Sebastian