Miscellaneous Hacks - NoMoreGifs

I had been working on a style for my now defunt site, while developing it, since IE7 was final and PNG's are just too cool to pass up anymore. I found it a pain to re-write all of the vBulletin templates to use the .png extension on the images. Not to mention this would make upgrading a pain in the butt.

I had Matthew make me this snipet of code. I told him I would release it and he said its fine.

So to you I now give you the ability to not have to use gif's but png's in your image folders.

You're webserver must support custom error documents via htaccess.

Installation,
Edit htaccess file to give a full/proper url to your new 404.php document
Put both the htaccess file and the 404.php file in the base of you images folder.

I only offer support when I have time. This modification is otherwise unsupported, but working.


For style developers, if you wish to use this, please give credit where credit is due , a link back to this mod would be great.

[Konstantinos]

why using this while we can use replacement variables if we want to have both png and gif
/buttons/newreply.gif -> /buttons/newreply.png

apart from having to add each replacement variable for every png we intend to use, is there any other benefit ?

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by Konstantinos

why using this while we can use replacement variables if we want to have both png and gif
/buttons/newreply.gif -> /buttons/newreply.png

apart from having to add each replacement variable for every png we intend to use, is there any other benefit ?

It'd be _alot_ of replacements, i'd rather not write that much code tbh.

[Zachery]

http://www.tf2-forums.co.uk/forums/i.../newthread.png redirects to >
http://www.tf2-forums.co.uk/forums/images/404.php But doesn't redirect.

Make sure your php error reporting is on.

[dannykilla]

I have spoken to my host and they say that error reporting is ON by default.
But said that this on the support ticket:

"Dan,

Error reporting is enabled for the server by default. This would only change if you created a php.ini file that disabled it or the script itself disabled it. Have you checked the directory where the script resides to see if an error_log file is being created?"

So what I think he is referring to vBulletin, does vB do this ?

Dan

[dannykilla]

Now my server is using PHP 5, I have error reporting switched ON. Is there any thing you can think of that may be causing me to have trouble with this hack?

Thanks
Danny

[dannykilla]

I have figured this out now, thanks to StGaensler!

I was putting the full URL path on the .htaccess file instead of simply putting this:

ErrorDocument 404 /forums/images/404.php

Thanks Zachery Awesome hack and thanks StGaensler!
Dan

[killswitch]

Terrible... won't work with easyPhP.

[Zachery]

What?

[eJM]

Originally Posted by Prezadent

You can easily rename a .png to a .gif and have the .png display normally in all major browsers.

No need for this hack.

Originally Posted by Zachery

You shouldn't though.

Why shouldn't we? I was just having trouble with 7 icons in the statusicon folder. I use Fireworks for my graphics work, so I created the images in PNG8 with drop-shadows. GIF transparencies just weren't making the cut. Anyway, I uploaded the PNG files and then renamed them to GIF files. Works great - a lot better than the transparent GIFs, although file size was increased.

I'm waiting to hear back from some of my older members to see if they think they render different than they should. Some of them might be using older versions of their browsers.

R'gards,

Jim McClain

[dannykilla]

anyone else get this working on 3.8 RC1 ?