UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 6 V6 Modifications Forum Design Integration Integrated Index Page 4.3 addon for UBBT 6.0

You need to edit the menupal.php file, inside the pals directory.

Look for this line (3rd from the bottom):

echo "$tableEnd";


Just ABOVE that line, add this:
echo "$rowStart<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourlink.html">The Text for Your Link</a>$rowEnd2";

That would place it right after the "Recommend Us!" link. But you could move it up in the list if you wanted.

Hope this amateaur hacker has helped.

Josh, you're an expert hacker in the making! Thank you very much, it worked perfectly.

Josh,

Thanks for the hand here!

I have been gone for a week. I hadn't planned on it but coudn't avoid having to get some projects done.

~Dave

hmmm...i can't get it to work...i just get the message that says its down...i have a ubb.threads installed and functioning already...this is my config...any ideas? help...jv

<?
// VERSION
$palVersion = "4.3";

// ---------------- PATH VARIABLES ---------------- //

// full path to the pal directory (no trailing slash / )
$fullPath2pals = "/web/home2/w026125/docs/htsthreads/pals";

// path to threads directory from index.php
$index2threadsPath = "";

// path to threads directory from pals directory (no trailing slash / )
$pals2threadsPath = "..";

// url to index.php (no trailing slash / )
$url2indexpal = "http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsthreads";

// url to pal directory (no trailing slash / )
$url2palsDirectory = "http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsthreads/pals";

// full path to the palimages directory (no trailing slash / )
$fullPath2palimages = "/web/home2/w026125/docs/htsthreads/pals/palimages";

// url to palimages directory (no trailing slash / )
$url2palimagesDirectory = "http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsthreads/pals/palimages";

Look at the very last line of your config, there is a variable to turn the index on or off.. you need to change the 1 to a 0 or vice versa, I can't remember, but it should be way down at the bottom of the file

WOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is very nice...but i'm not sure why the middle column information actually shows up in the first column...leaving the middle column empty...

now...if i could just find a tutorial on how to set up columns on the left and the right throughout the site i would be in heaven...

THANKSTHANKSTHANKSTHANKS!!!!!!!

Well, most of it is pretty documented within the file with comments, but ALL the settings you need to change are within the config file. Each "pal" or I guess block you can call it has a name, and each column has a list of the blocks, and a 1 for on, and 0 for off. So make sure your left column has only the blocks you want displayed, and your center block has what you want.. etc.

You're best bet is to read through most of the posts in this thread, as there are many similar questions like yours and lots of explanations Glad its starting to work for ya.

posted by JustDave:

---

Sounds great! I will be very interested in seeing how it handles on such a site.

---

argghhh... just installed:

http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/index.php

It's on a dedicated dual p3 1ghz with a gb of ram and it is taking 15-30 seconds to load the index... there's no traffic in the forums yet, but there are ~250k posts or so - most of which are archived... 11k members.


Any tips for speedup?

Can we disallow forums that are archived from the searchs for the top threads etc?

hmm.. yours is acting differently than mine. My index loads slow (2-7 seconds usually) but it loads the header almost instantly, then the rest of it comes up shortly after. On yours, the whole page is blank and everything comes up at the same time, which is weird since as like other sites, it should load the header first w/o any delay. *shrug* I dunno.

With some luck I'll be sending you a beta of 5.0 to test with. I lost a full week and this week will still not allow me to hit this up fully. I'm still not finished with templating and I haven't really scratched the surface as far as control panel setup goes. Once the template part is complete it will remove many of the configure settings from the configpal.php script. This will make for less coding needed for the control panel.

Large sites will still be hit harder when they have that many posts to pull from. This is the main reason for me wanting to create an archive feature that will use a seperate table that mirrors the layout of the w3t_Posts table to store older posts in.

The index page, in my opinion, should display current information. Visitors to a site with posts 2 or 3 years old or more probably expect more current information at the entrance.

ok we'll re-diret around this index page until some progress can be made

Allen, I've got it set up on a shared server, but we only share with 1 other site, so we don't have a problem there. I imported 190k posts, and it runs as slow as you've mentioned -- 15 to 30 seconds, depending on what I have turned on.

I started playing with it, turning things on and off, and making notes of the times. Here is what I've found after LOTS of playing :


Empty, all off Generated in 0.028 seconds. 4 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Searchpal3 Generated in 0.024 seconds. 4 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3 Generated in 0.024 seconds. 4 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1 Generated in 0.026 seconds. 5 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2 Generated in 0.057 seconds. 7 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3 Generated in 0.062 seconds. 9 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3 Generated in 0.071 seconds. 10 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3
Hottopicpal3 Generated in 3.223 seconds. 11 queries. Zlib compression enabled.
(added 3 seconds!)


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3
Shortstatspal1 Generated in 0.393 seconds. 15 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3
Shortstatspal1
Current Poll1 Generated in 7.534 seconds. 19 queries. Zlib compression enabled.
(added 7 seconds!! poll board NOT specified, random poll on)


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3
Shortstatspal1
CurrentPollPal1 Generated in 0.389 seconds. 19 queries. Zlib compression enabled.
(with poll board specified, no random)


Menupal1
Searchpal3
Newuser1
Newspal2
Loginpal3
Randprofilepal3
Shortstatspal1
CurrentPollPal1 Generated in 0.41 seconds. 20 queries. Zlib compression enabled.
(with poll board specified, random poll on)


If nothing else, it at least gives you an idea of what to turn on and off. I've found the Hot Topic really drags it out, as well as the poll, if you don't have a specific board specified for the polls. I also only have 1 forum specified for the newspal, because Dave mentioned that narrowing the boards down to 1 might help (it did.)

I still really like it, I hope 5.0 helps with some of the pals though, because I'd love to add more.

Thanks Lisa

I'll focus some on the hot topic box. (and many other areas as well... lol)

yes, thanks... it is most likely the hot topic doing this, as it is running through the 250k posts to check. I'll turn that one off and see how it improves.

It runs pretty fast empty

With Hot Topic:

Generated in 14.928 seconds. 27 queries. Zlib compression enabled.

Without Hot Topic:

Generated in 14.887 seconds. 26 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


Without Hot Topic and Last Seen:

Generated in 14.734 seconds. 25 queries. Zlib compression enabled.


With Hot Topic and Last Seen, but Without Top 10 Threads:

Generated in 8.594 seconds. 26 queries. Zlib compression enabled.

Seemed to make the most improvement... maybe we can specify forums to not check for top 10 threads.

That may help. Perhaps creating an additional field so a board can have an on/off setting for inclusion?

I am for it if it helps

I have been working on this, whittling down the different options, trying to save server load and just found this one:

Everything I trimmed helped some, some only a few hundredths of a second, some as much as a second. I eventually got it from ~8-9 seconds to ~6.7 seconds. However, when I turned off the top-rated posts, it next dropped from ~6.7 seconds to ~0.292 seconds

Anyways, looks like we found the major bottleneck with IIP, at least in regards to this particular large forum I am gonna turn a couple things back on as long as things stay below ~.5 seconds

Removing that top rated post pal from here reduced the generation time ~40% (~.57 seconds -->> ~.35 seconds).

That is quite a bit of difference. When I got some time I'll look over that pal box and see if I have the query done as cleanly as possible. Thanks.

Hmm... looks like I'll turn that off right now until 5.0 comes out Thanks for the heads up!

Yes, it isn't the program as a whole, just some pals that are the problem.

I pulled in a new copy of our database (I'd been using one that was almost a month old) that has 230k posts. I have the following pals turned on:

menu
search
login
new member
news (from 1 forum only) (limited to 3 or 5 really didn't make a difference)
polls (from 1 forum only)
short stats
random member profile

With all of those turned on, it's consistently at .3 - .4 seconds -- very nice!

One of the biggest influences on time for us is limiting the forums in news and polls. We have about 40 forums (about 1/2 aren't visible because they are only being used to store archives right now). If I didn't limit the forums to just 1, it added several seconds to the polls.

I'd love to be able to add the other pals on, if/when they are able to be speeded up. But it's still functional with the above turned on, and it isn't slow at all with the huge number of posts.

Even with the optimizations I have done with 5.0 there will still be speed problems on sites with high post counts. This is one of the reasons I want to create the archival system that would move posts to a different table in the database for archives. Having IIP pulling data from say the last 30 days is better than having it pull from the last 3 years... (just an example) LoL not sure if anyone's database is that old.

I'm going to cache more of the information that is displayed by IIP too so that will help.

Right now I'm uploading 6.0.2 so I can make sure IIP 5.0 wont have any problems with the current .threads release. I intend on sleeping very little this week in hopes of getting 5.0 done asap. LoL

Thanks for your hard work dave... just one more problem you might need to fix. You know how I had the problem with users logging into my forums after I went to 6.0.2 due to lack of me uploading a template? Well I fixed that, users can login fine there but cannot login from the main page "loginpal.php" as it is giving the same error.

I tried looking at what would need changing, but I'm not very good at code

I just uploaded 6.0.2 today but haven't set anything up yet. I'll post the patch code for anything that's not working. As it stands I'm going to try and not spend to much time on anything but getting IIP 5.0 finished.

No problem, I understand But for people who aren't smart enough to click the forums link and login there, they would rather just email me, lol. I also noticed eventhough I'm logged in, on the index page it is showing the login box rather than my info for PMs and stuff

hmmmm I don't think that's happening here is it?

you are correct, it isn't. umm... hrmm. Maybe I forgot to upload another template? I was lost in a sea of changes files this time around. What template(s) does the index use?

The index itself doesn't use any templates as of yet. IIP 5.0 will though. Are your cookies set site wide? That may be the reason it's not seeing you as logged in?

Just a thought.

Hrmm... you sure? (not like you wouldn't be since you created it ) The reason I ask is just for grins and giggles I re-uploaded ALL template files from the 6.0.2 package and instantly the loginpal box is working like it is supposed to now... just very odd is all.

hehe yeah I think I'm sure... but it's been a long month. (and it just started) LoL

I'm glad it fixed itself...

hey dave would you mind releasing your shout box ?
hehe
I added the shout box to mine but using an iframe
not a good idea for the none ie users

The shoutbox is part of 5.0 and is in an iframe. For browsers that do not support iframes (which is a w3c standard now) a link will be displayed to open a new window with the shoutbox. Currently the shoutbox data is stored in w3t_Posts and I have to change that so as to not place any more burden on that table. (mostly for larger sites) I'll have to create some pal specific tables to be used independantly from .threads to make things more managable and lesson the chances of cross contanimating.

oh got ya ok
well if it's w3c now then I'll stick with what I have ;-)

thanks for the reply :-) looking forward to v5 ya know LOL
I'm still using version 2.5

I'm not sure what's up with this error, but here goes. When using the 'recomend us' form, I get the following errors everytime with IIP 4.3.

Notice: Undefined variable: paction in C:\path\ubbthreads\pals\recommenduspal.php on line 3

Notice: Undefined variable: paction in C:\path\ubbthreads\pals\recommenduspal.php on line 53

Notice: Undefined variable: paction in C:\path\ubbthreads\pals\recommenduspal.php on line 80

Seems like the variable 'paction' is not carrying over from the index.php? I dunno what's up with this. I have not altered the recomenduspal.php file.

I'm headed to bed right now. I'll take a look at this after work tomorrow and see if I can find out why it would be caused.

woops the front page is broken on this site LOL
whatsup with that

The index is having the same problems .threads was when building the group query with ereg. I'll have to look over the code and show where some instances should be changed to prevent the error.

Hey Dave, I have a question about the Random Profile pal. Does it 'filter' or somehow limit who it shows? We're curious if it will show people who have been banned. It would be great if there was a way we could limit it just to group 3.

Along similar lines, we'd like to have the Top Posters only pull from group 3 as well. I looked at it and it was set to only show people whose ID number is >=3 (I think?), but then the top 5 posters are all admin or mods and that kind of takes the fun out of it for the members. The top 10 has admin, mods, and the rest are a few members that recently had a falling out (major mess ) and have left and created their own site. Having them up doesn't sit will with us. If we could limit it to people in group 3 it would be perfect.

Anyone know if this would be something simple to change? I tried several times to no avail.

I agree with Lisa's idea, since being the admin I have way more posts than anyone, so I don't need to be on the list No banned users or anything to worry about, but ya never know

Also, dealing with the random profile pal, could you make it so it displays the login name of the person? Sometimes people don't fill in their profile with a name so you don't know who it is unless you click "tell me more..." Just a thought.