Advanced Templates: Dynamic Templates Changing according to different conditions

This hack allows you to design dynamic vb templates which change themselves according to different conditions. Thus you can customize your board very powerfully with "intelligent/interactive" templates. It uses the same "conditional concept" just like my Webtemplates and Dynamic Forum Announcements Hack. With conditionals you can program your templates to:

• be displayed differently to different users.
• hide/display some part/texts/html codes/even the entire template for some users
• include extra text/HTML codes/secret messages inside which will be displayed if page visitor matches your pre-configured criterias
• Have multi-templates inside 1 template and each of them will be parsed and displayed only if their set condition applies.

You can program your templates according to many different criteria, such as:

• user's userid
• user's usergroup
• user's profile fields' input
• user's post number
• user's last visit time
• user's seniority (register date)
• today's date, day, month, week, year, hour, second, if today is user's birthday
• user's is visibility status
• style id user's using
• user's cookie status
• user's time settings
• (in forumdisplay templates) forum id
• (in showthread templates) thread id
• etc.

Some practical examples about what you can do with this hack:

• You can have different postbit templates for different users/usergroups.
• Display your board differently to the user if it's his birthday, if he is X, if he age <Y, if he didnt visit your board since Z etc.
• Display Admin Only Profile fields/or any profile fields in postbit if X condition applies
• You can hide Admin only links in your templates such as "Show IP".
• Disable Email/Pm User links in postbit or userprofile screen if reader is from usergroup X etc.
• Send different email text to different users according to different criteria. Add hidden email texts if X condition applies
• Hide "register" link if user is not a guest, add access to pm if user is not a guest
• Ban some templates if X condition applies such as dont display profile screens if user's X profile field = Y
• Disable some forums if today is X day or hour is Y
• Dont display thread view/user count/last reply date if user's usergroup is X
• Hide threads according to different criteria in showthread templates

Well there are literally millions of possibilities you can apply, so please use your imagination for more examples..

The Hack's Features:

• Installation is VERY easy: Actually 2 steps in 1 file will take less than 1 minute..You will be surprised how such a small modification will make such a big difference in your board.
• It's compatible with ALL vb versions I know
• The hack covers all the templates in your database: ie. custom templates, ALL vbulletin templates including even emails and error messages etc.
• It's fully compatible with all your installed hacks and their custom templates too.
• It makes many small hacks obsolete because you can now modify your templates to achieve the same result instead of hacking your board (=changing .php files)

Vbulletin v.3 has been announced to have "conditional" concept in templates, however my hack wasn't inspired by it at all, because I'm using the conditionals in my Webtemplates hack since March 2002 so in fact vb developers might be inspired by me. My Dynamic Forum Announcements hack uses the same concept for forum home announcements too.. (Wait for my other hacks depending on conditionals cause I really like them, they are really powerful and customizable)

Performance Issues
The hack does NOT add any MYSQL connections. It just process your already retrieved templates in a function to parse the hack conditionals. Thus the performance is IMO quite bearable. However please notice that if a template has a conditional in it, the hack have to parse it before displaying it and technically this parsing is done with PHP's preg_match command which is known as a powerful but slow command. So does it cause any performance problems? In most cases no. But if the conditionals are applied in a very frequently used and/or long template and/or you used too many conditionals in one template AND your traffic or server load is high, this MAY increase your PHP processing time whenever this template is displayed as the hack has to deal with the conditionals everytime this template is called. I suggest applying Teck's Microstat's hack and observe the PHP running time with that hack after you applied a conditional especially in a frequently used template (eg. postbit). If it slows down the display, simply reduce your conditional count in that template or delete the conditional or remove the hack altogether. Personally I dont have any performance problems in my own board related to this hack but just wanted to give my 2 cents anyway especially for high-traffic boards..

If you liked the hack (I guess you will), I strongly suggest checking out my Webtemplates hack which provides exactly the same feature for your NON-VB pages.

Also please click INSTALL if you use the hack, thank you..

09.Sep.2002 Bug Fix: If you installed the hack before 09.Sep.2002 please download the instructions again and reapply step 2, since I made an update for a small bug fix. There was a variable name collision which causes a problem with email validation screen which uses the same variable so I changed my variable's name. If you are downloading the hack now, go ahead.. The code you download is already fixed..
07.Oct.2002 UPDATE: I updated the hack code, so that people who have enabled template debugging in their Admin CP/vb Settings can also use the hack. Also small modification applied to increase template parsing time. If you installed the hack before my update, you may choose to reinstall (not necessary). If you are a new hack user, the instructions you download is already new version's.

Enjoy!
Logician \\=^))

[Logician]

Originally posted by Abbas
Using conditionals will it be possible to have separate templates for categories of forums? Or will you have to have a conditional for each forum in that category. I'm basically going to aim to have separate sections of my forum with different graphical styles etc.

I cant say anything before knowing what exactly you have in your mind but in the first look yes it seems you can do it via conditionals. The hack does not allow you to create multiple templates for one, but by using a conditional trick you can create multi-templates inside one template:

Example:

PHP Code:

[[(($bbuserinfo[userid]==1))]]
Your HTML codes if user's userid is 1
[[/(($bbuserinfo[userid]==1))]]
[[(!($bbuserinfo[userid]==1))]]
Your HTML codes if user's userid is NOT 1
[[/(!($bbuserinfo[userid]==1))]] 


So as you see we have one template but within it we actually have two, each of which will be displayed according to user's userid. (Notice ! sign which is used like "else")

However I might say that if you are trying to apply different styles for different forums you dont need a hack, you can do it by configuring your forum styles.. I believe you already know that?

[Abbas]

Thanks for that info. Yeah I know different styles can be done without hacks, but there may be different templates involved not just graphical styles alone, e.g. our gaming forums may have other templates for clan and multiplayer stuff etc...

-Abbas

[AndrewD]

Does this work ok with 2.2.6? I installed it as per instruction but conditional tests simply get reflected back unchanged.

I tried the advanced_functions code as a stand alone and it seems fine. Perhaps I've made a silly mistake somewhere

[Logician]

Originally posted by AndrewD
Does this work ok with 2.2.6? I installed it as per instruction but conditional tests simply get reflected back unchanged.

I tried the advanced_functions code as a stand alone and it seems fine. Perhaps I've made a silly mistake somewhere

yes it works with all vb versions I know.. Have you uploaded the file to your server?

More likely your condition didnt apply so it wasnt parsed. What condition did you test and where?

[Martin CX]

Wow! I can't wait to try this out!

/me clicks install button

[AndrewD]

Sorted out my problem re conditionals not getting parsed.

gettemplate actually contains two return statements - the first executed only if you have enabled template debugging. I had this option enabled, so the call to advanced_templates was not being made.

you need to make the following change to gettemplate

PHP Code:

 if ($gethtmlcomments and $addtemplatename) {
return advanced_templates(
"<!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: $templatename -->\n$template\n<!-- END TEMPLATE: $templatename -->"
);   }   
return advanced_templates($template); 


Great job, thanks

[memobug]

This looks great! I have two questions with how it might work:

1) Is the html between the conditionals parsed, that is if I use a variable name in the html there will it be replaced with its value or will it stay as-is?

2) Can I put a "virtual include" in there in the html conditional? I've done this before using php-include template, but I'm wondering if I can get around that.

Many thanks,

Matt

[Logician]

Hi Matt,

Originally posted by memobug
1) Is the html between the conditionals parsed, that is if I use a variable name in the html there will it be replaced with its value or will it stay as-is?

2) Can I put a "virtual include" in there in the html conditional? I've done this before using php-include template, but I'm wondering if I can get around that.

The parsing of templates does not change after you installed the hack. So you can answer all your questions according to this fact: Your advanced template would exactly do the same parsing if it was a normal vb template.

The hack only checks the template if there is special conditional tags inside and acts like this:
a) if the template does not include any conditional, it takes no action and returns the entire template just like a normal vb. template.
b) If the template has conditionals, the hack checks them one by one and
ba) if condition is FALSE, it deletes this condition (and its HTML code in between) from the template, as if it never existed in the template
bb) If condition is TRUE, it deletes only the condition tags and keeps the condition's HTML code in between so that it will be parsed.

As you see it does not interfere with vb's default template processing in anyway..

Hope this helps..

[Koss]

hi

will this edit all my style templates if I just edit the template of one style?

thanks

[Logician]

Originally posted by Koss

will this edit all my style templates if I just edit the template of one style?

I am not sure if I got the question correctly? After you installed the hack nothing changes in your board unless you apply a conditional to any template in any style set. After the installation, your templates will behave just exactly how they behave before and you'll NOT notice any difference in their display or something. However from now on you will be able to apply a conditional to any template in your database. Ie. your default templates in any style sheet, your custom templates, the templates the hacks you installed created, just anything. Whenever you add a conditional to any template, this template will be displayed according to this conditional. This is how this hacks works and I hope it answers your question too..