EyeStorm Blog

ForumMonkeys looking for phpBB3 developers

David — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:24:27 +0000

Our sister site, ForumMonkeys, is now looking for able bodied men or women with extensive familiarity with phpBB. For more information check out the Help Wanted page.

Wordpress Loop on Non-Wordpress Pages

David — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:22:40 +0000

I was looking for an easy code snippet to put the latest blog posts on the EyeStorm index page using the Wordpress loop. I remember it took me quite a bit of searching, that I had to keep trying different keyword combinations until I finally found something to help me. Today, I wanted to change the sort order of the posts and no matter if I changed it from ASC to DESC, nothing happened. I realized the code I had pilfered had some syntax errors. Having some PHP/MySQL knowledge, I fixed them and spent another ten minutes looking for that post again so I could add a comment with the syntax fix to no avail. So, I decided I would post this in case other people are looking for the same thing and having problems finding it.

Now that I’ve bored you with the short story, here’s the code.



        
        get_results("SELECT `ID`,`post_title` FROM $wpdb->posts
        WHERE `post_status`= \"publish\" AND `post_type` = \"post\" ORDER BY POST_DATE DESC LIMIT ".$how_many);
        foreach($news as $np){
        printf ("%s", $np->ID,$np->post_title);
        }?>

How To: Animated Favicon

David — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 02:50:50 +0000

Firefox allows webmasters to use animated favicons and it is likely more browsers will eventually follow suit. While Internet Explorer does not support animated icons in any way, there is an easy way to code things so that you can display an animated favicon in supported browsers and a standard icon for all others.

Normally, one could just plop the favicon.ico image in a website’s root directory and it would show up without even the need to add a link to it. To get both icons showing in all browsers, we’ll need to add not just the link to the normal favicon, but also to the animated one.

Create your animated icon 16 pixels high and wide. I recommend calling it favicon.gif and uploading it to your website’s root directory, which should be where your regular favicon.ico file is. Put the code beneath this paragraph anywhere between the tags of your website, making sure the paths are accurate, and you’re good to go. Firefox will show the animated .gif as the favicon, even when the user bookmarks the page, and Internet Explorer and other browsers that do not support it will continue to use the boring non-animated version. Note, if you have a cached bookmark image, it will show it until you clear your cache.

As you can see, the first link is the regular favicon and the second is the animated version. If you want to see for yourself, I recently added an animated favicon to ForumMonkeys.

The Anatomy of the vBulletin Animal

David — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:45:23 +0000

Part One

The Forumhome (a.k.a homepage, a.k.a index page)

Even despite years of study in its natural habitat, even though we have picked apart its scat and know what it eats (mysql queries), the vBulletin Animal nevertheless easily irritates newcomers with its ponderous template hierarchy. Over the next few weeks, I am going to try and manifest what I have learned after years of taming and grooming, and do it in color, so we all can at least get a fundamental understanding of vBulletin modification.

Here, you see a snapshot of the internals of the index page, commonly referred to in the vBulletin skinning circles as the forumhome.

So, looking at the forumhome template, we see that at the top it calls the header and navbar, and below it, the footer. The out-of-the-box vBulletin style begins the first element, the column headings (i.e. forum, last post, posts, threads) in the forumhome template; most skinners will tuck this code into the level1_nopost in a way that makes every forum begin with the category instead, followed by these column headings. Then, all that’s really left of the major organs is the level2_post which is where all the actual forum data can be found.

I often get questions about sidebars, those left or right hand columns you often see on forums where users plug random stuff (usually advertising) and how to get them to show up on just the index page, or to change them so they show up on every page. If you are coding a new skin or need to change the visibility of an existing column, the three choices of location, in order of popularity, are the forumhome, the header, and the navbar. Putting the code for your column in the forumhome template guarantees it will only be seen on the index page. You obviously, in every case, need to make sure that you planned the placement of your code correctly, so that when the user navigates to the actual post, and the column disappears, you didn’t leave an unterminated DIV or TD tag (thereby probably messing up the entire forum on every page but the index page).

If you want the column to appear on every page within your forum, the best way to implement this modification is to put it in the header template. The navbar template is another place you could put it, but there are a few pages that do not call the navbar and thus will not plug in the column, like the redirects, the error pages, and a few others. I often recommend using the navbar template for situations such as when you are running a CMS/Portal like VbAdvanced, which uses its own columns – that way you can turn the navbar off in the CMS/Portal, and not have to worry about juggling your own column around; you can keep the easy default three column layout of the CMS/Portal software and still have your custom column show up on the forum index and below. Another reason to use the navbar for your column is that it parses the statistics and other variables normally found under the What’s Going On table; the header does not.

Part Two

The Forumdisplay

The forumdisplay has two major functions. The first is apparent when you click on a category link or if you click on a forum link that has subforums attached to it. Clicking on the category link, for example, will show all the forums attached to the category (controlled by forumhome_level1_post), any subforums (controlled by forumhome_level2_post), and, if there are any threads, will also display the threadbit.

The more obvious function is just to display the threadbit, the actual threads people have posted. While all the controls and buttons are in the parent container and main template, the forumdisplay, if you are looking to maybe change the thread status icon background, change the order of the alt1 and alt2 classes in the thread rows, and so on, the threadbit is the place to go.

EyeStorm Blog Online

David — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:28:07 +0000

EyeStorm was running on Joomla, a decent Content Management System, but after a while it just seemed constrictive and, well, overkill. Besides some light blogging, the vast majority of our content is static and easily updated and a CMS was just too much bloat.

To that end, the static content has been separated from the blog. Although there’s some code cleanup and some aesthetics to put down later, everything is presentable enough now to open the doors to the public. We hope to be showcasing content in the near future that is appealing to not just our clients or prospective clients, but the web savvy as well.