https://www.grrr.co.za/blog.php?10-SlipperyDuck en Tue, 12 May 2026 21:43:27 GMT vBulletin 60 https://www.grrr.co.za/images/avenger/misc/rss.jpg https://www.grrr.co.za/blog.php?10-SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?780-vBulletin-Standardizing Fri, 05 Jul 2013 11:09:27 GMT Well, after several months I wasn't all together happy with my overall design of the grrr.co.za site.

Things had to change. So I made sure I found some time to look around at site and make notes of what I wanted to change.

One thing that was really bugging me was the disparity and silo effect between the blog, articles and forum sections. On top of that they never really looked any good.

As of today, I've finally gone through most of my noted things and completed the standardization of blog/article/forum - you'll feel like you're on the same system whichever one you navigate through.

Ive taken the time to add highlighting and hover effects to all the thing I could, giving the site a nice final tweak to get it looking nice, shiny and IMHO looking good.

I also found myself getting annoyed with Google and Yahoo jQuery scripts loading from their websites on each page load, so, I've nulled those and made the ajax scripts load locally on our domain/web-server instead, improving load-times significantly.

I then looked through several other aspects and found that patches/updates had broken a few things, which I have since fixed.

For now, I feel things are looking much better and more professional, if you can even call a gaming community that.

That's it for the overall design evolution, the next big thing is a move from our shared host to a cloud-based virtual server. This will give us direct access to our own operating system and allow us to install and tweak things the way we want them, as we need them.

Here's to better things to come ;) ]]> SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?780-vBulletin-Standardizing https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?4-vBulletin-Improved-Front-Page Tue, 29 May 2012 22:05:43 GMT Aww, the awesome goodness of a slider.

It took a few hours to figure it all out.
When I first installed the Slider - things just didn't to what I wanted, I couldn't figure it out.

I eventually figured out where many of the settings are.
With the slider your images have to be located on your site too, so you can't hotlink to another website.

With that I had to figure out about VB Image galleries.
It seems there are some good ones out there, but they all cost quite a bit.
Eventually I figured I'd just use the Built in Album in the user profiles.

There I found some limitations I couldn't get images to do what I want and the hunt was on to figure out why.
Had to go through many setting to find the limitations for JPG and PNG files. Their dimensions and file sizes were all set very low. Changed that.

Then Created a public Album and uploaded some files and tested again.

I found the Slider was just stretching the images and warping it. After much searching, I eventually just caved and decided to simply re-create the images in the 500px × 312px dimensions to simply fit the slider perfectly rather than tax myself over the ways and means to auto-magically resize proportionately.

Re-created, re-uploaded and tested.

Colour me impressed, it looks purdy cool.

Thats me for the day. ]]> SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?4-vBulletin-Improved-Front-Page https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?3-vBulletin-more-is-more Tue, 29 May 2012 14:21:48 GMT So, it's quite a beast.

It's a new Mindset too.
Finding and fixing issues has been a challenge, but patience and determination have won the day, at least so far.

Adding, changing, customizing, things are hidden all over the place.
I do enjoy the challenge of learning something new, so I'm not overwhelmed.

Now that things have started taking off, I'm quite stoked with the "What's New" feature, the "Friends" as well as the Visitors Message featutes.

All adding much value here, things that our users will discover over time.
One thing that did annoy me, that thankfully I quickly found a package/plugin to remedy, was the inability of regular users to change their own usernames.
Thank the pope for plugins.
Now users can log into their profile (from the quick menu below the main menu) [forum Actions] - [Edit Profile]
Then change their username from the second option "Username Change - Optional"

Quite handy.

Anyway, thats me for the day. ]]> SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?3-vBulletin-more-is-more https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?2-vBulletin-The-progress Sun, 27 May 2012 11:08:00 GMT vBulletin, our new software driving this forum. Specifically the publishing suite as opposed to just the regular forum software, is exceptional.... vBulletin, our new software driving this forum.

Specifically the publishing suite as opposed to just the regular forum software, is exceptional.
Features and workings of this beast and popping up here and there all the time.

During my exploration, I found the "promote to article" feature.
This feature is probably the one that gives me the biggest smile of them all, since the speparation of the CMS and Forum software has always been such a big issue for me. Now that we are fully integrated into one package, our users can just write a review or article of some sort in the normal forum threads, admins and/or moderators can simply promote that first post to an official article, chosing under which section/category it should reside.

It's really so easy and convenient.

One thing that is argueable not so great, though is actually a good thing, is the sheer volume of permissions required as you add plug-ins/packages to your software. Whist this isnt true for all plug-ins out there, it's true for most.
With users sitting in several usergroups as per our legacy forums, having to carefully go through each usergroup and double-check a massive amount of permissions each time a package is added seems cumbersome.
I with they could do that in the reverse, as in, install a plug-in/package then click on the package itself to assign usergroups and permissions there. Anyway, this is a necessary evil i suppose.

All in all, I continue to be amazed at the quality of this software. Kudos to vBulletin. ]]> SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?2-vBulletin-The-progress https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?1-Turning-Over-a-New-Forum Sat, 26 May 2012 11:57:30 GMT Well, it's an interesting day here at GRRR Squad head quarters.

For the first time in our history, we've gone ahead and purchased Web Software.
Previously we used SMF/Joomla/Concrete5 and other things, in an attempt to get more out of our little web-home than in the past. The old adage is applicable, you get what you pay for.
It took quite a lot to customize the free stuff, but was never really what we needed.
Our community needs to grow, with that we need the integrated CMS/Blog/Forum software that allows for single login and a host of plug-ins and features that you just can't get for free.
So here we are. The day has come, we've moved to vBulletin 4 publishing Suite.
While it's not quite done yet, the potential is already quite evident. Everything is well integrated into one single package and it's the most supported CMS/FORUM code available on the internet.
Sure it cost us a bit, but well worth it.

The migration was simply spectacularly easy. Other than having to re-examine all the permissions and resetting some things, which, whilst taking a long time, never became taxing, the process was actually very easy. I look forward to doing a lot with this new setup and am eager to see better community involvement as a result of this spectacular change.
My blog will update with additions and findings as we go along. That's it for now, see y'all soon.

Slipperyduck ]]> SlipperyDuck https://www.grrr.co.za/entry.php?1-Turning-Over-a-New-Forum