[HowTo] Design and Tweak your Frontpage

[HowTo] Design and Tweak your Frontpage

v1.0.0 [build for vBulletin 2.2.6 Final] last update:12/06/02

_____ Introduction:

• Each vBulletin forum installed on a web server is either a part of a web site or maybe the web site itself. Either way, the section that is probably the most requested by the end-user is the frontpage which holds the introduction to the forum, the categories with its boards and maybe some other boxes like the private messages, who is currently online and the birthdays. It speaks for itself, that at least this page should give a good impression to the end-user who is browsing your web site. And might consider to continue to browse it and maybe even register.
  
  It has been six months now since I have purchased a license for vBulletin. And since my forum has been online I had a lot of questions and awnsers to them on how to improve my site. Some that did not had a direct awnser and were sometimes somewhat hard to figure out, got sorted out and put together as a little how to so I could share the knowledge with other members who had the same questions and were looking for the same awnsers. Several of those threads turned out pretty nice and with some we found some issues and even though we were able to 'fix' them, the threads did look a bit messy. It was hard to figure out sometimes what to do where, etc. So that is why I have put together this thread, with some design tips and some tweaks in an easy (and better ordered) overview.
  
  Please understand that I am not a guru in anything, and that I am trying my best to get things to work for everybody. However, I will not and can not support older versions of these hacks, older versions of vBulletin, and/or integration with other code-hacks / template modifications. All template modifications in this thread are based on a clean installation of vBulletin 2.2.6 final. Some of the provided code are also very good examples on how you could continue to apply them to other pages of your board; so read and learn > 'How can I do this on that other page?'-questions means that you didn't read and learned.
  
  Said that, let's explain what you can expect.

_____ Index:[list=1][*] Breaking up the categories from eachother[*] Adding background images to the categories[*] Adding onMouseOver-highlighting effect to the boards[*] Adding your own (blinking and clickable) private messages images[/list=1]

Xiphoid thanks brother you are the man i have a hard time with searches.. lol

[nghiasi]

Thanks xiphoid!

[Tony G]

Hadn't seen this but nice work on it.

[PennylessZ28]

Works nicely, but one lil boo boo I can't seem to figure out for the life of me, when I split up the categories, Active Users sticks to the last category and for some reason the bottom of all my tables have a thicker black line, everyone else who has implemented this has perfect lines

Guess it don't like me example: http://www.hr3rdgen.org/forums/

Any suggestions? Awesome little guide btw, provided me with some great ideas!

[Ninth Dimension]

Installed it and it's working great (well, I only installed the first part, and changed the forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost_sponsor template to work with my sponsored by hack) but it's working great

how do you get the 2 corner images?

What a great set op template mods , my forum looks much better now
Thank you so much.

Very impressive, saved my time of digging through the source code and doing it myself.

[imported_Danielo]

Thank you very much
i haven't installed yet but it's very usefull

[Wij]

Great mods ;]

I've installed them all apart from category images,uum but I am just about to give it a go,what size do the images need to be btw?(i'm probably being dumb but I've had a long day trying to get a vB powered homepage working) :]

regards

Wij