Advanced Templates: Dynamic Templates Changing according to different conditions

This hack allows you to design dynamic vb templates which change themselves according to different conditions. Thus you can customize your board very powerfully with "intelligent/interactive" templates. It uses the same "conditional concept" just like my Webtemplates and Dynamic Forum Announcements Hack. With conditionals you can program your templates to:

• be displayed differently to different users.
• hide/display some part/texts/html codes/even the entire template for some users
• include extra text/HTML codes/secret messages inside which will be displayed if page visitor matches your pre-configured criterias
• Have multi-templates inside 1 template and each of them will be parsed and displayed only if their set condition applies.

You can program your templates according to many different criteria, such as:

• user's userid
• user's usergroup
• user's profile fields' input
• user's post number
• user's last visit time
• user's seniority (register date)
• today's date, day, month, week, year, hour, second, if today is user's birthday
• user's is visibility status
• style id user's using
• user's cookie status
• user's time settings
• (in forumdisplay templates) forum id
• (in showthread templates) thread id
• etc.

Some practical examples about what you can do with this hack:

• You can have different postbit templates for different users/usergroups.
• Display your board differently to the user if it's his birthday, if he is X, if he age <Y, if he didnt visit your board since Z etc.
• Display Admin Only Profile fields/or any profile fields in postbit if X condition applies
• You can hide Admin only links in your templates such as "Show IP".
• Disable Email/Pm User links in postbit or userprofile screen if reader is from usergroup X etc.
• Send different email text to different users according to different criteria. Add hidden email texts if X condition applies
• Hide "register" link if user is not a guest, add access to pm if user is not a guest
• Ban some templates if X condition applies such as dont display profile screens if user's X profile field = Y
• Disable some forums if today is X day or hour is Y
• Dont display thread view/user count/last reply date if user's usergroup is X
• Hide threads according to different criteria in showthread templates

Well there are literally millions of possibilities you can apply, so please use your imagination for more examples..

The Hack's Features:

• Installation is VERY easy: Actually 2 steps in 1 file will take less than 1 minute..You will be surprised how such a small modification will make such a big difference in your board.
• It's compatible with ALL vb versions I know
• The hack covers all the templates in your database: ie. custom templates, ALL vbulletin templates including even emails and error messages etc.
• It's fully compatible with all your installed hacks and their custom templates too.
• It makes many small hacks obsolete because you can now modify your templates to achieve the same result instead of hacking your board (=changing .php files)

Vbulletin v.3 has been announced to have "conditional" concept in templates, however my hack wasn't inspired by it at all, because I'm using the conditionals in my Webtemplates hack since March 2002 so in fact vb developers might be inspired by me. My Dynamic Forum Announcements hack uses the same concept for forum home announcements too.. (Wait for my other hacks depending on conditionals cause I really like them, they are really powerful and customizable)

Performance Issues
The hack does NOT add any MYSQL connections. It just process your already retrieved templates in a function to parse the hack conditionals. Thus the performance is IMO quite bearable. However please notice that if a template has a conditional in it, the hack have to parse it before displaying it and technically this parsing is done with PHP's preg_match command which is known as a powerful but slow command. So does it cause any performance problems? In most cases no. But if the conditionals are applied in a very frequently used and/or long template and/or you used too many conditionals in one template AND your traffic or server load is high, this MAY increase your PHP processing time whenever this template is displayed as the hack has to deal with the conditionals everytime this template is called. I suggest applying Teck's Microstat's hack and observe the PHP running time with that hack after you applied a conditional especially in a frequently used template (eg. postbit). If it slows down the display, simply reduce your conditional count in that template or delete the conditional or remove the hack altogether. Personally I dont have any performance problems in my own board related to this hack but just wanted to give my 2 cents anyway especially for high-traffic boards..

If you liked the hack (I guess you will), I strongly suggest checking out my Webtemplates hack which provides exactly the same feature for your NON-VB pages.

Also please click INSTALL if you use the hack, thank you..

09.Sep.2002 Bug Fix: If you installed the hack before 09.Sep.2002 please download the instructions again and reapply step 2, since I made an update for a small bug fix. There was a variable name collision which causes a problem with email validation screen which uses the same variable so I changed my variable's name. If you are downloading the hack now, go ahead.. The code you download is already fixed..
07.Oct.2002 UPDATE: I updated the hack code, so that people who have enabled template debugging in their Admin CP/vb Settings can also use the hack. Also small modification applied to increase template parsing time. If you installed the hack before my update, you may choose to reinstall (not necessary). If you are a new hack user, the instructions you download is already new version's.

Enjoy!
Logician \\=^))

[Logician]

@mikey8270:

Originally posted by mikey8270
is there any way to make it show like 'You have relied to this thread' or You have not replied to this thread' somewhere on the showthread page to everybody except guests?

Sorry this can't be done, because at the moment thread is displayed, vbulletin does not save the thread repliers info in a variable. If did, this would be possible.

You have to make an SQL query beforehand, to get if visitor is a thread replier and save the result in a variable. Then you can use this variable in your conditional in this hack to achieve what you wanted..

@g-force2k2:

anways i get the infamous 6==6 as stated in the past posts...

I would say your conditional syntax may be wrong.

For example if you wrote it as:

PHP Code:

[[($bbuserinfo[userid]==1)]] TEXT GOES HERE [[($bbuserinfo[userid]==1)]] 


it looks good but it is not. Please notice the closing tag lacks / sign. So it should be:

PHP Code:

[[($bbuserinfo[userid]==1)]] TEXT GOES HERE [[/($bbuserinfo[userid]==1)]] 


If this is not your problem, try to make this change:
find:

PHP Code:

 return "<!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: $templatename -->\n$template\n<!-- END TEMPLATE: $templatename -->"; 


And replace it as:

PHP Code:

 return "<!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: $templatename -->\n".advanced_templates($template)."\n<!-- END TEMPLATE: $templatename -->"; 


If this also not fixes it, can you please post here the conditional you used (please copy paste from the template) and also function gettemplate after you applied the hack.. Let me check..

[zonegray]

g-force2k2 - I had the same problem... template debug was turned off, but I still saw the 6==6 stuff, I even added the other hack that Logi mentioned, and that didn't work. Eventually I reviewed the installation with a gun to my head, and finally found the typo.

My mistake was that half the edits went to the wrong server, due to a peculiarity of ssh.com's Secure File Transfer that I used while editing.

[Logician]

Originally posted by zonegray
My mistake was that half the edits went to the wrong server, due to a peculiarity of ssh.com's Secure File Transfer that I used while editing.

[Babylon]

Hi Logician

Have to say that this hack is amazing! Finally gives me the full flexibility in my templates that I've been looking for! Great work

I was reading the previous posts in this thread (particularly the third page) and came up with a slightly different installation alternative which allows people to have the "Add template name in comments" option on, and makes the script slightly more optimised (using the info you said on the third page) and still makes installation only 2 steps

(I was very happy when reading through the hack installation details first time round to find there were only 2 installation steps as I was trying to install about 2 hacks at the time :/ )

Back to what I was talking about:

Instead of step one being:

1- Edit admin/functions.php, find
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
return $template;
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Replace it AS:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
return advanced_templates($template);
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Change step one to:

1- Edit admin/functions.php, find
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
if ($gethtmlcomments and $addtemplatename) {
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Replace it AS:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
if (substr_count($template,'[[/(')>=1) {
	$template = advanced_templates($template);
  }
  if ($gethtmlcomments and $addtemplatename) {
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

[Logician]

Originally posted by Babylon
I was reading the previous posts in this thread (particularly the third page) and came up with a slightly different installation alternative which allows people to have the "Add template name in comments" option on, and makes the script slightly more optimised (using the info you said on the third page) and still makes installation only 2 steps

Yes Babylon, your solution is quite good which solves 2 issues in 1 step.

In fact I should have already updated the instructions but I have little time and too many hacks to support nowadays.. Fortunately, hack thread is not yet too long, modification is not so crucial and the users of this hack are usually power-users (like yourself) who can achieve things without my help.

Anyway, I will hopefully update them very soon..

[Babylon]

Very true Well, again, excellent hack! JUst trying to think of the best things to use it for, but there's just so much i wanna change in my forum now!

This is only my second post ya know!

[Wildthinks]

Hi Logician,

i have try insert "Hi $bbuserinfo[username],", but display is that one and not "Hi Wildthinks" or so on... any Hints or impossible?

[Martin CX]

Originally posted by Wildthinks
i have try insert "Hi $bbuserinfo[username],", but display is that one and not "Hi Wildthinks" or so on... any Hints or impossible?

This hasn't really anything to do with the hack (or has it?) but use $username if you want to display the users username.

[Logician]

Originally posted by Wildthinks
Hi Logician,

i have try insert "Hi $bbuserinfo[username],", but display is that one and not "Hi Wildthinks" or so on... any Hints or impossible?

It should and I tested it and it does here..

Can you give more info? What was your exact conditional and in which template did you use it?

[Devil-GOD]

great
***install***