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.

[digitalSite]

Originally Posted by Faranth

didnt i saw to do that the first time?

From my understanding before, I was told to edit the paths to the smileys and icons...I already had the correct paths. From my current understanding, I was told to just press save in the icons/smiley section so that the iconcache could update.

If I misunderstood you before Faranth, I apologize I appreciate all your help! Thanks!

[digitalSite]

Originally Posted by Sergio68

Editing the Index template and paying attention

Hehe..thanks...do you know how or where I can find that information?

I am confused about how to "link" it so that it can show up in the middle area. :ermm:

[Tigga]

Did you read the info about the extra pages feature in the readme? It should be fairly easy to understand... Just create a new template called index_links (just for example purposes), then your link to that page would look like http://yoursite.com/index.php?page=links
And I believe Faranth did say to modify the icons and check their paths, but saving one is what actually makes the change. The icons are stored in a cache for vB3 and whenever one is modified then the cache is updated. I should have added the code to update the cache in the install file, but that was something I accidentally overlooked. That has been fixed for the next version though.

[digitalSite]

Thank you...I guess working quickly on 3 hours sleep doesn't help much, lol. Sorry Faranth for not understanding what you had told me already!

What's weird was that I did change the display order and saved it before, but that didn't work at the time...I had a big mess with files and stuff all over the place and have slowly updated everything and it works fine now! I knew not to give up on this hack - i knew it was me because I said I'm missing something before, lol.

My site is looking awesome already with Faranth's initial setup!

My site: http://www.dstcentral.com/adv_index.php (temporary address)

[proxyMX]

no one have any clues on my old problem that my forums are already in the root folder and i cant rename the index to index.php as it will over-write my vbulletin index!

[Tigga]

There's an option somewhere to change the name of your forum's main page. Just change that.

[digitalSite]

Question:
I created index_about.php and it is currently in root dir.
My link is: http://www.dstcentral.com/adv_index.php?page=about
but text is not showing...

What is the format of the template? Like, does it have to have php tags at the top and bottom? html tags? or just begin the about page with a table?

[Tigga]

Why did you create a new file? There's no need for that, just a new template. All you put in the template is the content you would like to appear in the middle, so starting with a table would probably be the best.

[alain4ever]

Originally Posted by Tigga

alain4ever - Open your adv_index.php file and look for "filesize," (without the quotes) and change that to "attachment.filesize," (again, wthout the quotes).

Thanks alot for reply

problem fixed

[FastAttack]

Originally Posted by Tigga

AutomatikStudio - Go to your icon manager in your Admin CP, modify one of the icons, and save it. You don't actually have to change anything there, but just save the icon. That should update the icon cache for all of them and fix the problem with the icons.
As for the PM problem - Are you running the most current version of this script? That was an issue in one of the earlier versions, but was fixed. Did you by chance replace $index_footer with $footer in your index template? If so, that could also be the cause.

rinkrat - Something like that would be fairly easy to do with conditionals. Just find the beginning <td> tag for the column you would like to disable, and add <if condition"!$page"> before that, and then </if> after the ending </td> tag.

13th_Disciple - I'm *hoping* to have the site up sometime this week. I'll be leaving for Cincinnati this Thursdsay though, so I haven't decided if it would be best to wait until after I get back or not. With Faranth around though, I may just leave him in charge while I'm away.

digitalSite - If you add conditionals around the blocks you don't want guests to be able to see then that should fix the problem... Ex <if condition="$bbuserinfo[userid]">
As for the images - See my first response in this post.

TheEDIGuy - Could you possibly provide me with a temporary admin account at your forum, and FTP access to your site as well? I'm honestly not sure why the calendar would behave like that, but if you could PM me with that info I'll gladly take a look and see if I can figure out what the problem is.

FastAttack - I tried registering on your site to see what the problem is with the avatar, but apparently you turned that option off. Can you tell me what URL it's pointing at for your avatar? Are you using a default one from your site, a custom one that's been uploaded, or did you enter the URL for it?

Milhouse - See my first response in this post.

GameMania - Remove the quote from your news post, or change your "News Maximum Characters" setting to a higher number so the ending quote tag will be included in the post.

alain4ever - Open your adv_index.php file and look for "filesize," (without the quotes) and change that to "attachment.filesize," (again, wthout the quotes).

Tigga the code is still there now it won't show.. I thought I fixed it but now only the Post information shows.

everything is default.. I am guessing it has to do with where the index is located.. I double check though

thanks!