WebTemplates 2.x: VB Integrated Content Management System

After a long wait, here is the new 2.x version of Webtemplates. First a short introduction for users who are not familiar with the old version:

This hack is a vbulletin integrated content management system. Term "Webtemplates" stands for dynamic webpages that reside in your MYSQL database and administered inside your vbulletin admin control panel. But they are more than regular site pages because they can automatically inherit visual design of your forum, can apply permissions according to your vb usergroup settings, can keep track of page counts, last visitorname/visit time, display page browsers in the page itself and in your whoisonline page etc. So basically webtemplates are dynamic web pages of your site which are powered by vbulletin.


WEBTEMPLATES 2.x FEATURES:
([New] indicates feature that is recently introduced in this 2.x version)

• Easy Installation : Webtemplates can be installed to your board without hacking even a single vbulletin file! It is coded as an add-on, not a hack.
• Conditionals : Webtemplates has built-in support for Logician's advanced templates conditionals so you can design webtemplates which change their display under different conditions. (Even if you don't have that hack installed)
• Private Webtemplates (NEW): With 1 click you can make a webtemplate "private" and it will be displayed to only certain usergroups.
• Apply VB Permissions: You can ban any webtemplate to any user or usergroup according to their userids or usergroupids. So for instance you can design a webtemplate which only members can see while guests can not or only user A can not see etc.
• Draft Webtemplates (NEW): You can put webtemplates in "draft" mode which makes them invisible to all but admins.
• Visitor Logging&Tracking (NEW): You can track certain users (by usergroup or userid) to monitor who visited a webtemplate and when. This is configurable per webtemplate basis.
• Site Contributers (Editor) Support (NEW): You can grant editing permissions for certain users or usergroups for your webtemplates individually and they will be able to update these webtemplates using their own editor interface.
• Categories (NEW): Webtemplates 2.x supports multi-categories for better webtemplate organizations.
• Multi Parsing (NEW): Webtemplates can now parse PHP or HTML or TEXT (=smilie/img tags/bbcode parsing like vb posts)
• Default variables : You can use/display certain variables in your webtemplates like username of the visitor, visitor email address, last visit time, page creation time, page last edit time, Last visitor name, last visit time etc.
• Outside Variables (NEW): Advanced users can now use outside variables in webtemplates, then webtemplates will accept/use/process user sent variables via HTTP_GET and HTTP_POST methods (eg. a HTML form can post to a webtemplate with this feature)
• Page Counter : Webtemplate has built-in counter and you can display page count to your visitors and you can edit it or turn it OFF or ON per webtemplate basis.
• Page Browsers Display (NEW): Webtemplates can display who is browsing that webtemplate while people is reading them (like default forum browse display of vbulletin)
• Who is Online Display (NEW): Webtemplates can display page visitors in who is online (This is Optional and require a simple hacking in file online.php). You can create private webtemplates which are hidden in who is online too.
• Theme Support (NEW): Webtemplates support "themes" which are parent webtemplates which include child webtemplates in them. For instance if you have 20 similiar pages which uses the same visual look, you can make a theme for them, then just insert their content into this theme. If you change theme later, all 20 pages' visual will change automatically.
• Header/Footer Inclusion : Webtemplates can use headers/footers (your default vb header/footer or custom ones)
• PHPINCLUDE per webtemplate (NEW) : Every webtemplate has its own "phpinclude" field which you can run PHP codes before loading the Webtemplate
• Help Documents : The script comes with built-in & detailed help documents (they are webtemplates too).
• Webquery Feature : With advanced "webquery" feature you can now add create dynamic webtemplates which include database query results. For instance you can easily add member count/post count/thread count/last 10 threads forum X etc. to your webtemplates with default webqueries that comes with installation or you can create your custom webqueries with basic SQL knowledge.
• Archieve to Text File (NEW): Webtemplates/Webqueries can be downloaded to a text file with one click for archiving purposes. You can also easily share these text files with other hack users.
• Login/Logout box (NEW): You can insert login/register box to your webtemplate if visitor is a guest and log off box if she is a member.
• Admin Panel in Webtemplates (NEW): Your webtemplates can include an "admin panel" displayed to only admins and by using them you can access many details and stats of your page while you are browsing them.
• Better Performance (NEW): Webtemplates 2.x structured so that it performs well even under heavy load conditions and high traffic servers. (See Performance issues below)
• Easy Back up: Simply back up your database (inside vbulletin or externally) and all your webtemplate structure is also backed up automatically.

For screenshots, FAQ, performance issues, migration from old version to new version, see below.

If you use the hack, clicking here will make sure you'll know about updates&bug fixes. It will also help me understand how many people is using the hack so please click the install button if you use it. Thank you..


Version Updates:
30.July.2003 - > Version 2.03

* Adds feature to include regular vbtemplates into webtemplates

2.02 users: apply this fix to update.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.

12.July.2003 - > Version 2.02

* Fixes a bug with outside variables.

2.01 users: apply this fix to update.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.

2.July.2003 - > Version 2.01

* Fixes bug that bothers webqueries if "Show Template Name" option enabled in vb admin cp
* Fixes bug in webquery $WQ_mostactivemembers
* Fixes visual look of webtemplate test
* Fixes visual look of admin panel and makes sure it looks ok in dark backgrounded boards too.

2.00 users: update here.
New users: Get the hack from the first post of this thread (which is the latest version), you don't need to apply this update.


Webtemplates 3.x (for vb.3.x) is released here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=76422

[Intex]

Logician - I have a page where I need to use the following code to refresh an image on a page automatically:

<head> 
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"> 
<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no"> 

<script language="JavaScript"><!-- 
function refre++++() { 
if (!document.images) return; 
document.images['myCam'].src = 'http://mysite/mypic.jpg?' + Math.random(); 
setTimeout('refre++++()',20000); // refresh every 20 secs 
} 
//--></script> 

</head> 

<body onLoad=" setTimeout('refre++++()',20000)"> 
<center> 
<img border=2 src="http://mysite/mypic.jpg" 
height="240" width="320" alt="Loading..." align="center">

Basically this refreshes the image on the page without refreshing the whole page. As you can see part of it is between the <head> tags. I've tried creating a page, but it doesn't refresh. The code by itself on a normal html page outside the forum works fine.

Any ideas how I might be able to achive this?

[Psidefect]

Amazing hack!

Exactly what I needed. Thanks.

[roxics]

This is awesome. Something I've been looking for for a long time. I've got it up on my site where my VB is at and plan to switch all the regular HTML pages to webtemplates.

Just out of curiousity do you know of a system similar to this that doesn't use a vbulletin database? I have a couple other personal sites where I'd love to add, edit and delete pages via templates from an adminCP (not to mention and awesome theme system like you have. Very simple to use and works well). But have no need for a forum on those sites or the price that goes with it.

I know moveabletpe is similar but it's cgi and I have no need for a weblog. Just a simple way to manage webpages online and change a general theme on them all quickly.

[Logician]

Today at 08:10 AM roxics said this in Post #108
Just out of curiousity do you know of a system similar to this that doesn't use a vbulletin database?

Frankly I don't know portal systems very well, nor like them much. I prefer to write my own system when a need arises so I'm not familiar with them (neither vb integrated, nor self-independent). So I cant help you with your question but I'm sure there must be some kind of PHP based portal systems around which would let you create pages within an admin cp and does not depend to vb.

[matham]

Hey

I really love this hack and I already have so many great ideas how I could use it to increase interaction between my main page and forums but I have one big cookie-related problem.

Everything is fine when i call the board cookie through the view.php?pg=template file but as soon as I put the view.php?pg=template into an include file or include view.php itself into my mainpage i´m logged out on the main page. And there seems to be nothing I can do about it.

I already tried this:
- i changed my settings to "accept cookies", logged out, erased all cookies in IE and then returned and logged in
- i already changed the cookie host domain to: .mydomain.de like suggested in the admin CP

It seems as if as soon the template file is put into another file and included there the cookies seem to get lost.

Any idea how I could solve this? I read something about removing sessionhash completely but I wonder if that wouldn´t make the Who´s online useless.

I hope that you have an idea how to work around this problem. Maybe I can put a line in my include file header or into the header of the page I want to include into that reads out the cookies from the board.

[Logician]

These are the problems I was mentioning when I say I don't suggest to use the hack as a main page or outside its default location.

Sorry I don't have any idea how you can manage your goal.

[matham]

Hey thx for the reply.

Hmm I´m wondering if a special global.php file that you would put in your web site root wouldn´t do the job.

Could I anybody try to code something like this? When I see php code I know more or less what it does and mean but i´m definately not able to do this on my own.

I think if it worked it´d be worth the effort.

[JohnXWA]

Crap

I installed VB 2.3.0 and this broke WebTemplates which I knew was gonna happen. So as I was on the old version, I went to install this one.

I can't run the SQL queries in the file, I keep getter errors. phpMyAdmin just reports SQL Error. However a small script called MySql Table Manager reports:

You have an error in your SQL syntax near '; INSERT INTO `wt2_themes` (`themeid`, `themename`, `themesortorder`, `themeban' at line 1 Number of Rows affected: -1

Any ideas?

[Logician]

Today at 08:02 PM JohnXWA said this in Post #113
Crap

I installed VB 2.3.0 and this broke WebTemplates which I knew was gonna happen. So as I was on the old version, I went to install this one.

I can't run the SQL queries in the file, I keep getter errors. phpMyAdmin just reports SQL Error. However a small script called MySql Table Manager reports:

You have an error in your SQL syntax near '; INSERT INTO `wt2_themes` (`themeid`, `themename`, `themesortorder`, `themeban' at line 1 Number of Rows affected: -1

Any ideas?

I can not say whether or not you can run the queries with other tools but I know that phpmyadmin runs them successfuly. As a matter of fact that query list is compiled with phpmyadmin in the first place so it will run them successfully too.

So my suggestion will be:
1- If your phpmyadmin is an old version, upgrade to the last version first.
2- Make sure you have permissions to run INSERT/UPDATE queries in MYSQL via phpmyadmin (check with your host) and confirm with by running a test INSERT/UPDATE query.
3- Then run the queries in phpmyadmin.

There are 2 ways of running it both of which are mentioned in the instructions. Although I confirmed that both works, try the other one if one fails for you.

If this still fails, I would suspect your PHP.ini or MYSQL configuration is not allowing you to send large number of texts to the server and if this is the case, you might try to run the queries in the query list in smaller groups. Or send the list to your host and they can run for you.

[JohnXWA]

The create table queries worked fine, but it was the Insert queries that were messing up the works. So I added each Inset a line at a time and it worked fine in the end.

I know it's not really for use as a sites only content system, but i'm using it that way and it's working perfectly. Great work and I look foward to the VB3 version Maybe with VB style WYSIWYG editor (Just a thought)

***EDIT***

Is it possible to place Who's Online on a webtemplates page?

[JohnXWA]

Anyone?

[glo]

Hi Logician,

Just installed the hack,
Your instructions were sharp! :cheeky:

Now i just have to make sure i can utlise it properly!

Thanks.......clicks install!!!

[mossyuk]

j e b u s h c h r y s l e r.

Now thats a hack! *installed*.

[Logician]

New Version 2.03

Added Feature: You can now pull any regular vbulletin template into your webtemplates (See screenshot below)

[Logician]

Screenshot of added feature in 2.03