The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

Mooff · #1 10-09-2011, 09:23 AM

We released our completely reworked cms part some days ago. And i just thought this would be the right place to ask what and if we are missing something/ where we can improve it.

Link: www.united-forum.de/news
Style: UF_Standard (the default style for our board - cms part of the other styles isn't completely ready yet)
Targetgroup: German Command&Conquer players (thats a RTS computergameseries

)
Desired feel the site should have: Newsmagazine

Fire away.

Alfa1 · #2 10-09-2011, 04:38 PM

I've also posted this on vb.com as a response to your post there, but for the sake of completeness, here it is:

Mooff, that's an outstanding job!!!

How did you create the image captions?
How did you do this: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0c9m161c7

There is a text overlap on http://www.united-forum.de/news/command-amp-conquer-s5/uebersicht-command-conquer-tiberium-wars-283.html#!prettyPhoto
See: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0d8m1420d

Quote:

- plugin to remove tags and bbcode from the preview

What do you mean with 'remove tags from the preview'? I do not have tags on the preview.

The link 'Zum Forum' on the preview missed the threadid. http://www.united-forum.de/showthread.php?t=

Quote:

- bb-code plugin for galleries (see here f.e.: http://www.united-forum.de/news/command-amp-conquer-s5/uebersicht-command-conquer-tiberium-wars-283.html#!prettyPhoto[gallery]/0/ )

I assume that you mean this: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0d7m15x2e
Thats very nice. What exactly are you showing? A gallery from a certain user or from a certain category?

Quote:

- custom grids as base - @everyone who is trying to mod their cms, get rid of that yui-(insert flame) as fast as you can

Please expand on this.

Quote:

- more heavy css coding to make everything stylevar based, needed for our ~9 styles

Your source code looks much cleaner than default vbCMS pages. More content, less crap. Good for SEO as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mooff

Ours:
http://www.united-forum.de/news/

Is it successfull? Well i don't exactly know, we released the update this week.
Is is customized? Heavily.
Can i give you a how to? No. It's hardcoded for our board, the adminside is very basic and it needs heavy modifications everywhere.

A list what we have done:
- plugin for subheadline/headline
- plugin to remove tags and bbcode from the preview
- bb-code plugin for galleries (see here f.e.: http://www.united-forum.de/news/command-amp-conquer-s5/uebersicht-command-conquer-tiberium-wars-283.html#!prettyPhoto[gallery]/0/ )
- bb-code plugin for gallery as content (bottom of this news f.e. http://www.united-forum.de/news/comm...hoben-299.html )
- bb-code in order to float pictures and quotes in the articles (we are going for a magazin type style)
- widget for the featured articles including a basic admin frontend in order to change things in a minute
- nivo slider widget including customization in the slider engine for the background fadeing and a basic admin frontend to change things in a minute (widget is released for free on vb.org, not with our custom look though which won't work on a default vb4)
- navbar, header and above body modifications in order to have the navbar above the slider and the slider fullwidth and board fullwidth while the newspage is fixed to 1000px
- custom grids as base - @everyone who is trying to mod their cms, get rid of that yui-(insert flame) as fast as you can
- plugins for the navtabs, so the 'BattleZone' has it's own navtab (we used a how to on vb.org for this one)
- plugin for the dp sphinx search (the sphinx search is amazing btw) so we can grab similar articles and show them in the preview and article pages
- some heavy weightlifting on css and templates to a) make it possible to have a white cms while having a dark board b) get that magazin look we want
- more heavy css coding to make everything stylevar based, needed for our ~9 styles
- some custom widgets for navigation, youtube, social network, battlezone main tournament widget, battlezone recent tournaments, upcoming tournaments
- template modifcation on the recent threads widgets to make it look cleaner
- template and php-code modifications in the recent articles widget used on the battlezone
- plugins for the rss part in order to not show rss-icons on the board, but on the cms. Another plugin to stop the board-rss (given someone manages to find the link somehow) from sharing our threads, we kinda like our content to stay on our board. :P
- php code modifications in the vbcms rss to a) set the feed language in the header to german (yeah it's hardcoded to be us-en) b) limit the amount of previewtext included into the feed.

I think thats everything.

Hope you guys like it and i hope our users like it. Cheers =)

Mr.Danko Jones · #3 10-09-2011, 05:53 PM

Looks awesome! Wish you were on our team to do our CMS!!

Mooff · #4 10-10-2011, 06:17 AM

Thanks for the praise. =)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alfa1

How did you create the image captions?
How did you do this: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0c9m161c7

That's our featured articles widget.
Admin puts in 4 ids in the frontend and the php widget grabs the according preview-picture, subtitle and title and throws them together with some css

Quote:

There is a text overlap on

Thanks for the bugreport, i'll see what i can do there.

Quote:

What do you mean with 'remove tags from the preview'? I do not have tags on the preview.

We are removing all html-tags which are present in our preview (expect url). Let's say in the article it could make sense to use font-sizes, smileys, bold text, quotes, line breaks ... in the first 2 sentences - well it doesn't in the preview, so we cut the preview down to plain text.

Quote:

The link 'Zum Forum' on the preview missed the threadid. http://www.united-forum.de/showthread.php?t=

Thanks, i'll look into that aswell.

Quote:

Thats very nice. What exactly are you showing? A gallery from a certain user or from a certain category?

Galleries are admin/editor only and work like this:
Create a gallery via jAlbum (a custom plugin creates the index.html we need for prettyphoto)
Upload that gallery (thumb-folder, big-pictures and index.html) to our FTP
Use the gallery bbcode and give the appropriate options. f.e. /gallery="folder=foldername"/
the php behind the bbcode does the rest and generates either the gallery, or gallery as content.

Quote:

Please expand on this.

Your source code looks much cleaner than default vbCMS pages. More content, less crap. Good for SEO as well.

your second line is what i meant with getting rid of yui.

The yui2 source code just looks awful (yui3 is a lot better). So if you want multiple colums and footers or headers, or some really fancy stuff you end up with tons and tons of code like that:
(that would be one widget block in yui2)

Code:

<div class=yui-b>
<div class=yui-gx>
<div class=yui-main>
<div class=yui-b yui-g>
<div class=yui-first>
<ul class="widgetcolumn">
---vb4-stuff---
<li>
<div class=block/widget/article>
... and finally your content
</div>
</li>
</ul>
--end vb4-stuff
</div></div></div></div></div></div>

and you have that for every widgetcolumn. horrible imo.

so we changed it to something like that:
(that would be a full cms grid - slider, articles + sidebar, 3 columns next to each other as footer)

Code:

<ul class=uf_slider>
vb4-stuff
</ul>
<div class=uf_main>
  <ul class=uf_articles>
  vb4-stuff
  </ul>
  <ul class=uf_sidebar>
  ...
  </ul>
</div>
<ul class=uf_column>
 ...
</ul>
<ul class=uf_column>
 ...
</ul>
<ul class=uf_column>
 ...
</ul>

And then write some own css to make those new classes the appropriate width and float them to their places. Alot cleaner that way. =)

btw. the flatten-grid function vb4 offers is awesome and if you know what you are doing (css and html wise) it makes not using yui relatively easy.

setishock · #5 10-10-2011, 11:47 AM

WOW just WOW! That's really nice. (Mine should look so good)

Sage Knight · #6 10-10-2011, 02:26 PM

OHMIGAWD.

Fantastico, looks awesome, I never really seen something like it. Great job!

RobbieZ · #7 10-11-2011, 07:50 PM

Shame it doesnt match your forum!

setishock · #8 10-14-2011, 11:37 AM

The forum follows the typical gamers type of forum, dark colors. But the cms is bright and easy to read. I still say wow when I look at it.
Nicely done.

Mooff · #9 10-14-2011, 02:50 PM

setishock is right - the different colors are a design choice

Our board is about 12 years old (10 on vbulletin) and our default forum theme has allways been dark. We cannot change that without alienating our users and we don't want to change that since we think dark colors do fit a gaming forum better.

For the newspage we think this isn't the case. Here a white background works better. So we used the same colorscheme as our default forum style, but, well more white. We hope the connection is still there, so the users do know it's the same network and at the same time are looking into how to improve this connection.

As for our other styles the colors of newssite and board do match. And those are a bit more gamerish in the cms aswell, using colorful background images.

thecore762 · #10 10-16-2011, 01:27 AM

Mooff, your CMS customization is truly something to look up to.
It shows how much customization you can do with vBCMS, but it will take I'd say for the most of us a while to be able to create such front page.

CMS should look like that out of the box

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