donottumbledry
01-28-2010, 10:29 PM
Newbie so please be gentle... I have a few questions. ;)
We (the forum community I am a member of) are going for something completely different with our website. We are probably trying something that is very unlike anything that has gone before us but we're exited about being able to deliver something new to our community.
In order to create our goal we need a flexible CMS + Forum - hence looking very much at VB4.0 Suite as we already use 3.6.x VB forums successfully so porting over to v4.x would be (relatively) painless.
However, in choosing VB Suite we need it do stuff it probably wasn't written to do - therein lies the problem! What I want is to pull just selected forum headers and display those headers in the 'home page' of the website. These headers would be listed in a virtually identical format to that which the forums we know and love are presented - but I would just want certain ones to appear. Each user will have the option of selecting which forums are listed (within reason) and so therefore this selecting and displaying of forum headers must be done dynamically.
I also require the user of a place to store custom data. An example of this data would be a list of forums that would be displayed on the homepage. However the rest of the data would be quite complex and the best way to store it would be in a PHP serialised array in the database. This is all very well and good but I need that information to be easily accessed by a PHP script. I know in VB 3.6.x you can use the $vbulletin class which holds all the userdata plus any custom fields one might have set up in AdminCP. Ideally using a (hidden) custom field to hold my custom data would be perfect as it would be accessible in any PHP script that needed to use such data. The only problem is that I do not know how VB handles this data. If the storage and retrieval of this data to/from the database would cause the PHP serialisation to 'break' them I can no longer rely upon this method to store my custom data - I therefore would need an alternative.
Third question hangs around how much of the forum pages can be customised using this data? I understand that in this new version of vBulletin the header, body and footer sections are treated as independent sections (forgive me if I am wrong on this!) but does this mean that userdata is not universally available to all these areas during a typical page request - ie. would requesting userdata for the footer section result in null or undefined values or is there a way to make the userdata persistent (or reloadable) in each of the page sections?
Thanks in advance and I hope you can help me! :)
We (the forum community I am a member of) are going for something completely different with our website. We are probably trying something that is very unlike anything that has gone before us but we're exited about being able to deliver something new to our community.
In order to create our goal we need a flexible CMS + Forum - hence looking very much at VB4.0 Suite as we already use 3.6.x VB forums successfully so porting over to v4.x would be (relatively) painless.
However, in choosing VB Suite we need it do stuff it probably wasn't written to do - therein lies the problem! What I want is to pull just selected forum headers and display those headers in the 'home page' of the website. These headers would be listed in a virtually identical format to that which the forums we know and love are presented - but I would just want certain ones to appear. Each user will have the option of selecting which forums are listed (within reason) and so therefore this selecting and displaying of forum headers must be done dynamically.
I also require the user of a place to store custom data. An example of this data would be a list of forums that would be displayed on the homepage. However the rest of the data would be quite complex and the best way to store it would be in a PHP serialised array in the database. This is all very well and good but I need that information to be easily accessed by a PHP script. I know in VB 3.6.x you can use the $vbulletin class which holds all the userdata plus any custom fields one might have set up in AdminCP. Ideally using a (hidden) custom field to hold my custom data would be perfect as it would be accessible in any PHP script that needed to use such data. The only problem is that I do not know how VB handles this data. If the storage and retrieval of this data to/from the database would cause the PHP serialisation to 'break' them I can no longer rely upon this method to store my custom data - I therefore would need an alternative.
Third question hangs around how much of the forum pages can be customised using this data? I understand that in this new version of vBulletin the header, body and footer sections are treated as independent sections (forgive me if I am wrong on this!) but does this mean that userdata is not universally available to all these areas during a typical page request - ie. would requesting userdata for the footer section result in null or undefined values or is there a way to make the userdata persistent (or reloadable) in each of the page sections?
Thanks in advance and I hope you can help me! :)