vBadvanced Homepage

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vBadvanced.com is now open! There you will find more information regarding vBadvanced Homepage, FAQ's, hacks & modifications, and more.


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.

[danbc]

Originally Posted by Faranth

vB has a built in RSS feed already

It has, where?

[Tigga]

rinkrat - The gallery you pointed out is not Gallery, it's vBadvanced Gallery and probably won't be available for another couple of months.

jancarlo - You will need to modify the links and form action to point to the full URL to your forums in your "STANDARD_ERROR" template.

ciaranirl - Just follow the instructions in the readme file. The installer does most of the work for you anyways.

[tgmorris]

Thanks for all the effort. I notice that an older error is still alive in the index template though for users that will use the Login block.

This line:
<script type="text/javascript" src="$vboptions[bburl]/clientscript/md5.js"></script>

Should be:
<script type="text/javascript" src="$vboptions[bburl]/clientscript/vbulletin_md5.js"></script>

[digitalSite]

Does vbAdvanced help me add certain features from my forum on my "existing" home page?...meaning, my home page is NOT a template not script, but my own web site front page.

Any help is appreciated!

[13th_Disciple]

tigga - sent you an email several days ago.. just wondering if you have gotten it or if you have had a chance to respond yet.. would have pm'ed you, but some folks on here get freaked out when they receive pm's..

[Tru Smiles]

I installed the hack with no difficulty, but I have one small problem.. On the forum home and index home, the icons wont appear. They are located within the right directory, yet appear as a broken image. Smileys on the home page appear as a broken image too, and I have no idea why o_O

Any clue? The skin I'm using all have the /forum/path set so I dunno whats up! Any help would save me

[Nmidia]

If I wanted to integrate the New Posts code into the standard Navbar - what changes would I need to make?

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by 13th_Disciple

tigga - sent you an email several days ago.. just wondering if you have gotten it or if you have had a chance to respond yet.. would have pm'ed you, but some folks on here get freaked out when they receive pm's..

see this is how we get tigga tto check his email
* Faranth pokes tigga hard with a stick

Originally Posted by Tru Smiles

I installed the hack with no difficulty, but I have one small problem.. On the forum home and index home, the icons wont appear. They are located within the right directory, yet appear as a broken image. Smileys on the home page appear as a broken image too, and I have no idea why o_O

Any clue? The skin I'm using all have the /forum/path set so I dunno whats up! Any help would save me

right click on the broken picture and see where its pointing too

your best off using http://www.mysite.com/forum/images

Originally Posted by Nmidia

If I wanted to integrate the New Posts code into the standard Navbar - what changes would I need to make?

Depends

[tgmorris]

A couple of minor items that I bumped into while checking error logs.

$index_footer uses $cronimage which has a relative path to cron.php. This not only generates an error it means cron doesn't run from the adv_index page - which normally wouldn't be a big deal. I added

$index_footer = str_replace('"cron.php', "\"$vboptions[bburl]/cron.php", $index_footer);

after the index_footer template is eval'd.

The 2nd minor item deals with the usage of "$vboptions[cleargifurl]". If the definition is changed to a path such as '/forums/clear.gif' or a full absolute path then things break when using the admincp as values such as '../$vboptions[cleargifurl]' are used within the code. I reverted my definition back to "clear.gif" and just placed a copy of the image in my web root directory for now.

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by tgmorris

A couple of minor items that I bumped into while checking error logs.

$index_footer uses $cronimage which has a relative path to cron.php. This not only generates an error it means cron doesn't run from the adv_index page - which normally wouldn't be a big deal. I added

$index_footer = str_replace('"cron.php', "\"$vboptions[bburl]/cron.php", $index_footer);

after the index_footer template is eval'd.

The 2nd minor item deals with the usage of "$vboptions[cleargifurl]". If the definition is changed to a path such as '/forums/clear.gif' or a full absolute path then things break when using the admincp as values such as '../$vboptions[cleargifurl]' are used within the code. I reverted my definition back to "clear.gif" and just placed a copy of the image in my web root directory for now.

i belive placing it in the root dir is probally the best option

and im sure tigga will look into fixing the cron problem