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LEFT MENU BAR: Helpful Hints on Implementing Left Menu Bar
I originally did it the same way I did it in UBB and ran into lots of problems cosmetically when other pages would load. I decided to try it a different way and explained this in an e-mail to another member here. I thought it may help someone else...especially those migrating from UBB.
After doing what I told you, I spent a lot of time trying to fix the appearance of other pages that would come up screwed up because of the table being closed at the beginning of it. I then decided to try a different approach and restored the original settings for the header and footer in the styles section and then copied the html code from the templates section, Forum Home Page, and pasted it into Front Page via the html section. From there I created a table with two rows and two columns. I put the menu on the left column, second row down, and cut and pasted the information for the forum listing into the right column. Above these two I put the other information in, such as "You last visited...", and so forth. The stuff that normally goes right above the forum listings table. I did this so it would remain aligned with this table instead of the full table, which would mess up the info. that is aligned to the left. Once I got it looking the way I wanted I copied all of the html code and pasted it back into that section where I copied it from in the first place and saved it. I did a little fine-tuning and got it looking good.
There are a couple beneficial reasons why it should be done this way as opposed to the other way. First, it will not mess up other pages due to tables and what not. These pages include confirmation pages, or notification pages. Before, they would all have to be fixed individually, assuming you can locate the page and the code. Second, doing it this way means you don't have to have the menu on the left of every level of your forum (i.e. forum home page, specific forum thread listing page, the threads themselves). If you want to do it to the other pages then you can. I am still debating how far I want to do it. Perhaps I will do it one level, two levels, and then three levels, saved in three different styles so the user can choose which one he/she wants.
Okay, you may still want a title on top of every single page. This is easy enough by copying the html code from the header section used in the other way, pasting it into Frontpage html section, and then clicking on the normal section and placing the title above everything else. This will put your title on every page, but won't create any table problems since you aren't using a table here. You don't have to worry about getting rid of any </table> or anything.
Doing it this way has really cleaned it up for me and now it is a simply copy and paste html code from Frontpage to the appropriate place in vbulletin. Hopefully this helps. In UBB I didn't have any problems doing it the other way. Now that I have figured out how to do it this way I am much happier since it simplifies things a lot and cleans up a lot of code.
If you have Frontpage and would like to see the Forum Home Page and how I did it just let me know. Good luck!
Marc
