vBulletin LTS

vbulletin Basic Icons exported to png 8-bit format
Mod Version: 1.00, by Michael Morris

For those not familiar with it, PNG was originally conceived as a replacement for the Compuserve GIF format in the mid-90's. Although the default Adobe Fireworks file format, PNG is also readable by most browsers. Unlike GIF, PNG preserves the opacity of the images - PNG's do not suffer from the halo effect.

There are three flavors of PNG - PNG8, PNG24 and PNG32. Of these PNG32 is the most widely known about. Unfortunately PNG32 images are not read correctly by Internet Explorer 6 or earlier when they have an alpha channel. The resulting gray box effect is quite ugly to look at and has lead to most developers staying away from PNG altogether.

HOWEVER, PNG8 doesn't have this problem. IE 6 and even 5.5 for mac will read these files correctly and preserve their opacity setting. Further, older browsers that can read PNG (most IE 4 or later, Netscape 4 or later) at all will simply drop the colors in the palette with an alpha setting if they don't understand it, otherwise they treat PNG8's as gif files.

The upside of this is the PNG8 files can be read by all browsers. PNG8 is also the lost format of the Internet because, interestingly, only one graphics package will save a file in PNG8 -- Fireworks (and it's done so since at least version 4). Further PNG8 files are considerably smaller than PNG32 files and for small images or images without a wide range of colors PNG32 offers no real advantage over this lost format.

With that long introduction over, the fileset of this modification simply presents all standard vbulletin icons saved in PNG8 with their alpha settings saved. You need only edit the templates of your board changing any pointer to .gif to .png. I haven't tried it, but you should be able to do a find and replace in templates and replace all instances of .gif with .png (BACKUP YOUR TEMPLATES BEFORE DOING THIS).