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First Look at vBulletin 4 Template Tags
by
01 Jul 2009
Reposted from my site at www.vbcodex.com Following my previous article, I want to give some information about the new template tags in vBulletin 4. The use of template tags is not a new concept to vBulletin 4 developers and designers. We have been using them for years for conditional statements and building phrases that had parameters. In vBulletin 4, Phrase parsing has been moved to the variable parsing system but conditional usage has been improved and several new tags have been added to make things easier. Like the variable system I talked about earlier, tags are in their own namespace so all tags are prefixed with 'vb:'. This actually provides several benefits but the primary one is that you can program scriptable web editors like Dreamweaver or Expressions Web to parse these conditionals and provide output based on values you provide. They also allow proper syntax highlighting to occur in most web editors. Template Conditionals Everyone who has worked with vBulletin templates in the past should be familiar with template conditionals. They provide a wide range of use in determining what information to show depending on various conditions. In vBulletin 3.X, the IF conditional was simple and easy to use. In fact, you can still use pretty much the same format in vBulletin 4. However a couple of new tags were added to make conditionals more robust. Here is an example:
The new thing here is the <vb:elseif /> tag. It allows you to branch your conditions better and reduce the number of nested conditions you may need to make. Conditionals also have a new shorthand using a curly brace syntax. In today's templates, you see a lot of code that looks like this:
That is a brief example but makes a real mess of syntax highlighting and can't even be validated. With the new shortform notation it would look like this:
As you can see the second examples looks a lot cleaner and maintains syntax highlighting. Each For a long time, users have wanted a way to do loops in templates. Heck, I have wanted to be able to do loops in templates. vBulletin 4.0 includes the <vb:each> tag which accomplishes just that. While it is not being used for the default templates at this time, it will probably be used in the future to eliminate some of the many 'bit' templates in the system. The Each tag will allow you to easily process an array and apply formatting to its elements. Example:
If the array looked like:
The output could look like:
Comment How many times have you wanted to leave commented notes in a template so you can understand why you did what you did? Or you work on a team so others need to know what is being done in a template? Before now, you would have had to use HTML comments that would have been output to the Browser and visible in the page's source code. vBulletin 4.0 introduces the comment tag so you can add your comments and not worry about them being sent to the client. Comments will be stripped when the template is compiled into PHP. Can also be used for hiding code blocks from being output to the user. Example:
Literals The final new tag is the literal tag. It allows you to stop the parsing of any nested tags or variable syntax within the tags. It works similar to the noparse BB Code. It is handy when you want the template to simply output the raw HTML instead of putting it through the template parser. Example:
Summary While the changes to tags are not as extensive as variable handling, the new tags provide new ways of handling templates and will provide better abilities to create addon products in the future. The Each and Comment tags will come in especially handy while doing customizations in the future. I hope this gives you another good glimpse into the vBulletin 4.0 template system. Last edited by Wayne Luke; 18 Nov 2011 at 15:34.. Reason: Correcting Typo |
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#2
01 Jul 2009, 14:29
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Awesome! Thank you for this Wayne
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"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time!"
"It's important to only think about what you desire, not what you fear to achieve your ultimate goal!! No members have liked this post.
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#3
06 Jul 2009, 23:13
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Thanks this looks good 4.0 will be the best php software ever.
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#4
24 Jul 2009, 16:04
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great article Wayne - 5 stars
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Former vBulletin.org Staff Member Latest Articles: Liquid Layout = Less Ad Revenue? How to Monetize Your Site Improve Web Page Performance How To Write For The Web If it needs instructions, there's room for improvement. Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don't give them new features just because your competitors have them! No members have liked this post.
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#5
24 Jul 2009, 16:18
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Originally Posted by Princeton
5 stars from me as well 
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#6
10 Aug 2009, 11:34
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Excellent. Nice additions..
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#7
08 Sep 2009, 19:01
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Ok, quick question. Instead of using this code inside of templates to not display something
We would use this?
Or either one?
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"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time!"
"It's important to only think about what you desire, not what you fear to achieve your ultimate goal!! No members have liked this post.
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#8
08 Sep 2009, 19:15
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Originally Posted by Redlinemotorsports
you can still use the HTML comment, but it will display when someone "views source" where as using the <vb:comment>, that comment will be stripped and not processed by the HTTP server, hence not being visible when someone views source.. make sense?
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Please Do Not PM me for vBulletin assistance... I am currently only doing customization & addon's for Xenforo. No members have liked this post.
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#9
08 Sep 2009, 19:25
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Yes, thank you
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"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time!"
"It's important to only think about what you desire, not what you fear to achieve your ultimate goal!! No members have liked this post.
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#10
26 Oct 2009, 00:09
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I reached this page searching for a way to do loops in templates. Seems I will have to code it the hard way for now...
 However, happy to know it will be available (and specially that it will look for "keyid's", allowing multidimensional arrays). No members have liked this post.
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#11
26 Oct 2009, 21:54
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Thank you, Wayne!
This actually looks a lot easier and better than the old system, and seems more logical, too.
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Just a placeholder.
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#12
09 Nov 2009, 20:39
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vB4 as come a long way with coding. Much appreciated Wayne!
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#13
12 Nov 2009, 02:08
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I think it became more complicated !
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#14
20 Nov 2009, 14:41
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Not all that different. Very helpful. I do like the comment options though very much.
TY No members have liked this post.
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