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]

[Alfa1]

I would love a vb3 version.

[Popa Andrei]

Ok first of all thanks for this great mode and i hope it will be finished.
Second this is mi first refresh so i hope it is ok

custom icons added.
0 imageprefixes for forums found.
Processing post icons.
14 post icons found.
Adding sidebar icons.
120 icon candidates added.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-main.png.
97 icons added.
Creating sprite (width:1000px height:117px).
Sprite saved, updating css-rules.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-main_rtl.png.
97 icons added.
Creating sprite (width:1000px height:117px).
Sprite saved, updating css-rules.
CSS template successfully inserted.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-forumdisplay.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-forumdisplay_rtl.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
CSS template successfully inserted.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-forumhome.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-forumhome_rtl.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
CSS template successfully inserted.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-showthread.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
Starting with images/sprites/sprite-10-showthread_rtl.png.
0 icons added.
Sprite was not created.
CSS template successfully inserted.

And in the end one question:
The refresh is done automatic or i have to do it manual.If its only manual chan we create a schedule with vb task?

EDIT: it removed all my custom forum icons
How can i make it to make sprites from the forum icons?
When i enable the sprites plugins it deactivates the forum advaced icons.

[Alfa1]

I have tested this out on a small forum of mine (vb4.1.8 + TMS), and the forum icons are gone too. How can I fix this?

The TMS footer is an issue, as it has an adverse effect on SEO.

Please offer this to vBS for inclusion in the stock vbulletin release.

[Popa Andrei]

uninstalled until incompatibiliti with custom forum icons is fixed

[Mooff]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

I have tested this out on a small forum of mine (vb4.1.8 + TMS), and the forum icons are gone too. How can I fix this?

Are the icons in the sprite? Meaning, manually open the png and check whether they are there.
If they are it is possible that in vb4.1.8 the forumbit templates changed in a way that the automatic templatemodifications programmed for the TMS do not work anymore. Then you would have to manually correct those templates.

We are currently in the process of updating our forums (not the addon!) and will do modifications there if necessary, but probably won't have time to program new TMS rules anytime soon cause we anticipate the new command and conquer beeing announced on december 10th. Since we are a c&c board this will then be our primary focus and is going to eat up all our time.

Meaning once the templates are fixed i can post how they have to look in the default style so you can do the changes manually.

[Alfa1]

Yes, the sprites images are there, but the images of sprites01-left.png do not show. The images in sprites02-left.png do show up.

[Mooff]

I'm not sure about the nameing conventions anymore in 0.7.2, but sprite01 should be a different style than sprite02. Can you check if the templates are modified accordingly in style id 1?

[Alfa1]

There are 1 Template-Modifications that were not desinged for the currently installed vBulletin version. To make sure that vBulletin and your installed Products are working correctly, you must check and maybe modify those Template-Modifications.

Thats probably the issue.

[Popa Andrei]

This looks like a lot of extra work?Cant this plugin be made to work without the TMS plugin since the TMS plugin its not even supported anymore?

[Mooff]

Osbes came up with a great idea to automatize the template changes, but we need a php-hook for it. He just started a jira-report on it. Please vote for that hook, so we can improve the addon:
http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-13825

Cheers