Webbstre

Customer
Hi everyone. I'm loving my DBTech products and am look forward to the updates each weekend. I thought I would take a moment to share with you all a little space saver I discovered for my forum. You see, after installing so many mods to my forum my postbit area looks a little huge. You can see the same thing happening on this forum, in that a response that takes up one line is created in a post area that takes up half of the screen, thanks to the engorged postbit area.

What I used to take care of this problem was a mod on vb.org called DJ's Dynamic Tab Content for Postbit_Legacy. The installation is a little bit of a hassle, as you have to manually edit and move around a fair amount of code to get the effect you want, but the end result is a postbit area with tabs, and you can click on each tab to reveal a different block of information. Right now I have my basic stats on the first tab, which takes up only a little space, and most of my activity and statistics on a second tab, with plans to add more tabs as I install more mods.

As much as I appreciate the original author of this mod, I would really like to see something similar and improved from DBTech. Most of DBTech's products focus on one hook in the postbit area, which means it is very difficult to split apart information into separate tabs. For example, let's say I want my regular Activity stats in one tab, and an entire separate tab dedicated to achievements and medals. Right now I haven't been able to achieve that (no pun intended), because I don't know what to edit to make achievements not be locked to that same hook as the regular Activity bars.

One feature that is rather bugged in the mod I recommended is the automatic tab rotation. I guess it causes a lot of trouble, so I haven't even attempted to use it. If I could make auto-rotation work and give my users an option to turn rotation on or off within the postbit would be pretty useful for sharing info about my users. Another feature that would be great (and the original author doesn't look to have time for maybe) would be the ability to edit tab contents from within an admin control panel area, rather than editing the postbit legacy template itself.

Most importantly though, is that if DBTech came out with its own version of this kind of modification, they (you) could make it so all DBTech products are easily and automatically integrated into the tabs, removing the need to mess with hooks and lines of code.

Whether or not this suggestion is taken up, in the meantime I still suggest the above mod for anyone using a lot of modifications that add to their postbit area. It is a huge space saver without losing any content, which is vital with all the great products out there waiting to be imported into VB.
 
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Great idea, and I thought of integrating DJ,s Dynamics, but too much editing and actually with the vB4 where the code change in each version it's verry difficult for high custom
 
I looked into this mod, got it working somewhat, but it ended up being too much work and I put it on the shelf to do "another day", still haven't gotten back to it. I've considered recommending something like this to DBTech myself, so glad you did it and I can just second it. =) Would be a great mod!
 
Once my site goes live I'll post a link to show it off. Glad others like the ideas too. I agree that the amount of editing necessary is pretty ridiculous. It takes a lot of time to get things like you want it.
 
WOW, it's a great modification! I agree with you, with the tabs the informations of a user is more professional and ordered!
 
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Been thinking about something like this for a long time, Now that I see theres demand for it i'll start looking at it more closely =)

Cheers guys ^.^
 
:D

I know this is a slightly older post, but I wanted to comment on a few things.

As much as I appreciate the original author of this mod, I would really like to see something similar and improved from DBTech. Most of DBTech's products focus on one hook in the postbit area, which means it is very difficult to split apart information into separate tabs. For example, let's say I want my regular Activity stats in one tab, and an entire separate tab dedicated to achievements and medals. Right now I haven't been able to achieve that (no pun intended), because I don't know what to edit to make achievements not be locked to that same hook as the regular Activity bars.


One feature that is rather bugged in the mod I recommended is the automatic tab rotation. I guess it causes a lot of trouble, so I haven't even attempted to use it. If I could make auto-rotation work and give my users an option to turn rotation on or off within the postbit would be pretty useful for sharing info about my users. Another feature that would be great (and the original author doesn't look to have time for maybe) would be the ability to edit tab contents from within an admin control panel area, rather than editing the postbit legacy template itself.
I, too, am chagrined at the amount of postbit editing involved, but that's mostly out of necessity, and not so much time. The problem we run into is precisely what you've mentioned. When products use the hooks to display code. If we were only ever dealing with form fields, there wouldn't be much of an issue. But because of the fact so many products use template hooks, you'd end up almost always have to do some major template editing if you wanted to go beyond just displaying the typical form fields.

Also the issue we ran into when having the auto-rotation enabled is it seemed to be nerfing people's ability to stay logged in. Also, if you have this script automatically running 15 times on the same page, you run into performance issues.

All of this, of course, still comes back to the fact that I'm not really a coder. I just play one on TV. The JavaScript that I use is a Dynamic Drive script. And while freely available to use, it's unknown what interactions it will have with different scripts and features running on different websites. However, that is the only issue I've ever run into to date, not counting the slight bug with posting JavaScript through AJAX.


Most importantly though, is that if DBTech came out with its own version of this kind of modification, they (you) could make it so all DBTech products are easily and automatically integrated into the tabs, removing the need to mess with hooks and lines of code.
I would love if more modifications had alternate ways to display their content. I'd be willing to work with anyone who wants to streamline that. Right now I'm trying to get achievements to display in someone's postbit, which is why I ran into this thread. I actually, wouldn't mind knowing how they got it to work here. :D

Whether or not this suggestion is taken up, in the meantime I still suggest the above mod for anyone using a lot of modifications that add to their postbit area. It is a huge space saver without losing any content, which is vital with all the great products out there waiting to be imported into VB.
Thanks for that. I am looking into a product version for the tabs, but I'm limited by the way modifications work and by my own experience. But I'm always available for support if asked. Provided, of course, I'm not engorged on whiskey and doughnuts, again.
 
What would be possible, and something I'll probably be exploring since it's our primary support request issue these days, is to create a form of display library.

So say that you could create a method for mods to "register" content availability, and then create an interface for picking what tab displays what content, if that made any sense :p

It could work without modifying postbit if people accepted that it wouldn't alter any of the vB core content, just add a new row of tabs beneath said content.

Of course not a lot of mod authors would support it right away, but if it got popular then I'm sure they would come around, especially if we gave them an easy API to work with that just consisted of 1 function call or some such :)
 
What would be possible, and something I'll probably be exploring since it's our primary support request issue these days, is to create a form of display library.

So say that you could create a method for mods to "register" content availability, and then create an interface for picking what tab displays what content, if that made any sense :p

It could work without modifying postbit if people accepted that it wouldn't alter any of the vB core content, just add a new row of tabs beneath said content.

Of course not a lot of mod authors would support it right away, but if it got popular then I'm sure they would come around, especially if we gave them an easy API to work with that just consisted of 1 function call or some such :)

That would, actually, be great. I don't know if my modification is popular enough yet that other authors would warrant it. But if it opened doors to other implementations, too, I bet more would be willing to go for it.
 
I'll whip something up over the weekend then :)

Do you mind if I use the dots from your mod? They work well for the majority of skins (except light gray / black ones xD)
 
Not at all. Though, I'm surprised the color is so often used. It's actually a shade of blue and grey from my old forum. I'm thinking of doing something for vB4 dot's that kind matches the default header, since I see it changed so seldom.
 
Hopefully it will be available next week, though I am currently in the process of moving to another country, so my ability to code will be diminished somewhat :p
 
You'll be able to either directly copy template HTML code or, in case of DBTech mods, freely choose what tabs they go in without any code editing needed.

That's just for the Lite version.

In Pro, each Tab and each individual View will also have a setting to deny anyone who is a member of one or more usergroups from viewing it.

We will also have further customisation in the works for Pro :)
 
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