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]

[giorgino]

Hi Sebastian
I mean the forum custom icons, see the pict

[giorgino]

The mod I use for custom icons is https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=244351

[klaus]

Works great for me on vb414. There are less requests like promised.

However I use Absolute path (http://cdn.domain.com/forum/image/buttons vs. images/buttons) in my image_dir style vars and this plugin doesn't seem to support it when I run the "refresh".

Overall I think this is a very significant performance enhancer that VB should have built into the software about 2 years ago. Thank you for writing this add-on and keep it going.

[Mooff]

@giorgino
The way you use that mod seems to be no different than the basic vb4 setting (forum prefix).

check our board. We have different icons for almost all our games - starcraft2, tiberium twilight, tiberium wars, red alert3....
www.united-forum.de

[giorgino]

Originally Posted by Mooff

@giorgino
The way you use that mod seems to be no different than the basic vb4 setting (forum prefix).

check our board. We have different icons for almost all our games - starcraft2, tiberium twilight, tiberium wars, red alert3....
www.united-forum.de

I've tried to install your mod that work but it reset the forums custom icons to default icons... what's wrong?

[Osbes]

@giorgino
The feature to use forums custom icons is builtin in vBulletin 4. You can add to every forum an own imageprefix, so it will use forums custom icons. If you use the vBulletin imageprefix for your your forums, these icons will instantly added to the sprite.

If you want to further use the Forum Category Icons addon, i can create you a plugin, so this icons will also added.

But i would advise you to use the builtin solution from vBulletin, so you didnt need an extra addon and an extra plugin from us on top of this.
This could make your workload during every vBulletin Update easier (less addons and plugins = less problems)

###

@klaus
Can you send me the output, when using an absolute path, via PN? This would help me finding the problem

Best regards
Sebastian

[doctorsexy]

Will give it till it can be loaded with less fuss... looks good :up:

[giorgino]

Originally Posted by Osbes

@giorgino
The feature to use forums custom icons is builtin in vBulletin 4. You can add to every forum an own imageprefix, so it will use forums custom icons. If you use the vBulletin imageprefix for your your forums, these icons will instantly added to the sprite.

If you want to further use the Forum Category Icons addon, i can create you a plugin, so this icons will also added.

But i would advise you to use the builtin solution from vBulletin, so you didnt need an extra addon and an extra plugin from us on top of this.
This could make your workload during every vBulletin Update easier (less addons and plugins = less problems)

Ouch Sebastian!
I don't know how to customize each icon per forum basis, with standard vB4 features. Can you advise me a guide to perform this? So I can uninstall the plugin and use yours?

[Mooff]

@giorgino

In the ACP go to
-> Forum Manager
-> search for the forum you want to edit
-> edit forum
-> scroll down to 'Style Options'
-> Prefix for Forum Status Images --> add your forum prefix there (you can have a different one for each forum - and you need to add the prefix in your subforums as well, if you want the special icons to show up there). For forums which should use the default icons - do nothing.

you then need icons which are named accordingly
So if your forum prefix is, let's say, 'sc2_'
you need the following additional icons
sc2_forum_new-48.png
sc2_forum_old-48.png
sc2_subforum_new-48.png
sc2_subforum_old-48.png

In your ../statusicons folder.

[Mooff]

Originally Posted by doctorsexy

Will give it till it can be loaded with less fuss... looks good :up:

Unfortunately we can't make the template changes easier.

In order to use sprites we need to replace the image codes in those templates. And since images are widely spread around in those templates it is a bit of a hassle to replace that code.

In addition we can't just upload the whole templates cause the code inbetween the image parts might be modified heavily on some boards and shouldn't be replaced.


If anyone has an idea how to make it easier - please let us know.