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One of the most sought-after pieces of code for a lot of community administrators is how to integrate Vbulletin’s login system with their own non-vb pages.  Luckily, I have the code!  I’ve been using this code for a number of years, and it’s worked flawlessly.

What is Vbulletin?

Vbulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com) is a community forum that you install on your website.  I highly recommend them if you want to have a solid community, just the addons alone are worth it.

The Code

First off, for this code to work you need to make sure your pages are  in .php format.  That is the only this will work since all the code is in PHP and ties into the Vbulletin database, which is in MySQL.

The first piece of code you need to put at the very top of your page is this:


<?php
chdir("/home/yoursite/www/forums/");
require('./global.php');
@include('./includes/functions_user.php');
$vbulletin->session->vars = $vbulletin->session->fetch_session($vbulletin->userinfo['userid']);
$session['sessionhash'] = $vbulletin->session->vars['sessionhash'];
?>


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Creating a web page used to be a simple process of making a table, adding a header, some text, a footer and you’re done.  Ok well it wasn’t THAT easy but it was a lot simpler than it is today.

W3C

One of the problems facing developers today is whether to code a page by using the W3C coding standards.  Is it needed?  I think so.  Having clean code is one thing, but by following the W3C guidelines, it will ensure that not only YOUR page, but ALL pages will have the same standards.  This also applies to everyone that is also following the same coding standards.  What this means is that YOU and lot of other people will be coding along the same lines, which in the long run helps us all build a nice, clean set of pages throughout the entire WWW.

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Coding in CSS can be a challenge for web developers since there’s usually some roadblocks courtesy of all the different web browsers out there. For example, when creating an unordered list, each browser has its own way of positioning it and giving it its own margin and padding values.

How do I change that?

Very simple – reset!  Whenever I create a new CSS file, I simply add this at the very top:


* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}


What does it do?

That small piece of code resets the margin and padding to zero so that I’m basically telling the web browser, “I’m not going to add a margin and padding to anything unless I want to add a value to it”.  So if I wanted to actually add a margin to an unordered list, I would add one:

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One of the most widely used pieces of code that is used in PHP is the if/else conditionals.  These conditionals can be used to do anything from checking a user’s login, to showing a different message based upon certain criteria.

What is it?

Let’s say you have a database of members and when someone logs into your site you want to display “Welcome back!”, and for guests you want to display “Hello guest, please register” – here’s what your code might look like:


$username = $result['username'];
if ($username) {
echo "Welcome back!";
} else {
echo "Hello guest, please register";
}

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Colors can make or break a website design, period.  In the 90’s, most sites were all over the color spectrum – from black backgrounds with yellow text, to white background with purple text.  As the times have changed (and thank goodness they have), plus with the common use of CSS, there are no more reasons to use terrible colors in your site.

Ugly page

That’s ugly!  Notice the bright background with different font styles and sizes, some highlighted or underlined…

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When working on websites almost non-stop daily, it can often be difficult to find time to just have fun with it.  From coding a picture gallery to creating a custom shopping cart in PHP, yes it can be fun.

Ok so maybe coding a shopping  cart isn’t fun, but coding in CSS can be!  Take CSS3 for example; not all browsers support it, but I wish they would since it makes things much easier to do, such as creating rounded corners.

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Google’s browser, Chrome, is set to launch extensions soon, most likely next week.  With the popularity of Firefox’s extensions, Chrome having extensions would make it a strong contender.

Although that’s a nice thought, it will be interesting to see how those extensions are rendered within the Chrome browser, especially since Google is constantly trying to make it the fastest browser on the planet.  Everyone knows that as you add more extensions to your browser, it will eventually slow it down somewhat, so will Chrome’s extensions do just that?  Probably a bit, but I can’t see slowing it down too much since it’s Google!

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I know most people still use Internet Explorer, but honestly it’s the worst browser out there.  Sure, they’ve added some nice features like tabbed browsing but with others like Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, there’s no reason to stick with IE.  I still use it for testing purposes, but if the masses didn’t bother with IE then I probably wouldn’t use it at all!

When it all started

Internet Explorer first debuted in 1995 as a part of Windows 95, they’re now at version 8, which comes with Windows 7.  It’s served its purpose by leading the way for other browsers, but the time has come to hang it up.  Take Firefox for example; it has changed the way a lot of us have used the internet, from tabbed browsing, to browser addons.  Then Google’s Chrome took it a step further by integrating it with their search engine, and now they’re even going as far as making it THE browser for their Chromium operating system.

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CSS is the proper way to build a website nowadays, whereas years ago sites were created using HTML tables.  What people need to realize is that tables were not intended to be used to design something, rather they were meant to hold data.

Table Structure

I still use tables, basically when I need to list something like a set of rows that contain a list of songs.  It would look like this:

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Eventually this was going to happen, some thing only remain “free” for so long.  Twitter is apparently starting to charge for premium accounts, where as of January 2010, users can charge their followers who want to read their tweets.  The prices will range from $1.15 to $1.60 (U.S. Dollars), and the account holder will pocket 70% of the money, Twitter claims the rest.

Will it work?

I’m not too sure this will work, but it could as long as it’s geared mainly for businesses that have a solid following of clients that need to keep up to date with their tweets, or a company (maybe even for web developers) that offers to tweet updates about their web server or website, for example.

The reality is…

What will probably happens is that people that consider themselves important, or Hollywood celebrities will use this, which in turn will create a whirlwind that will just spiral out of control.