vBComments: Coranto News Integration

[DraX]

Hi all, before going into detail here, I would just like to thank Lawrence Williams (lawrence_cecil_williams@hotmail.com), the developer of this hack/add-on for his permission to repost this here.

He is not an avid user of vBulletin, and created this add-on as a special request. Since I knew that it could be useful to the vb.org community, I asked his permission to post it here.


With that said, a bit of an introduction. Coranto is the continued evolution of a perl news script called NewsPro. It's an incredible news updating script that is used on many sites. Recently, the old developer of Coranto has stepped down from the palte, and the community of users has continued it's development in his absence. you can find the NEW homepage for Coranto, as well as downloading the program and it's Add-Ons, both user-made and community-contributed here (http://coranto.gweilo.org).

Coranto itself only requires a server with Perl. This add-on, vBComments, requires the server to have the DBI Perl modules installed with the mySQL DBD package.

vBComments allows you to have your news items posted both into Coranto's text database (or mySQL database, if you use CorantoSQL, another community Add-On) for publish to your front page news, and to a specified forum within your vBulletin Database.

You can choose which vBulletin User the post should appear as in vBulletin, and which forum to use (NOTE: html code MUST be enabled for the specific forum for the news post to appear correctly. You may be able to work around this with a little bit of creative style template use within Coranto and a small amount of Perl knowledge. When I figure it out I will make sure this gets updated in both this thread and in the vBComments distributable.).

It then allows you to have a [Comments] link appear on your news post on the non-vB front page of your site, linking you to the thread. It also allows you to see how many comments have been made, but only if you use the dynamic news include (viewnews.cgi) for inclusion onto your home page (otherwise it would only show how many comments were in the thread the last time the news was updated).

This addition requires NO programming knowledge, and NO changes to your vBulletin installation. There are no changes necessary to Coranto, thanks to it's unique HOOKED Add-On system (which I would LOVE to see in a future version of vBulletin).


As an added note, it is recommended that you create a forum specifically for News Discussion on your vBulletin, and add the usernames of your news updaters to a custom user group that has permission to Start New Topics there, leaving other users with only the ability to reply to threads.

Hack version: 2.03b
vBulletin version DOESN'T MATTER, as long as it's 2.0+
Coranto version required: 4.x (build 29+)

[DraX]

Support for this hack will be provided both here (to the best of my knowledge) and in the Unofficial Coranto Forums (http://coranto.gweilo.org/forum/)

[Bloodfist]

I have had this installed for a while. Good hack if you use coranto.

[[D]Vincent]

Vincent]Sounds great. I'll install it when I switch hosts :D

[Lanigironu]

Great. I will definitely use this.

[tractor-beam]

Can anyone provide a link where I can see a demo of this??

Thanks!

[Tim Wheatley]

I have it on my site.

http://www.racesimcentral.com

The script generates posts into the news forum at the top of here:

http://forum.racesimcentral.com

[SpankMe]

Good hack and have installed it on my Kiwi Biker (http://kiwibiker.dynu.com) site.

Is there any development being done on this hack. I would really like to give standard users the ability th choose which forum the thread is created in.

[DraX]

You can already do that for them by creating multiple vBComments profiles, and setting the user permissions for the profiles to match the users you want to have access for.

Unless you are using one user account (i.e. News System) for your vBComments posts, you'll have to create a profile for them to post as their username in each of the forums you want them to be able to post to. (i.e. vB DraX in News; vB DraX in Community; vB DraX in Support)

[SpankMe]

I was hoping there would be another way than having to create lots of profiles for each user.

It would be cool if the hack could be written to allow you to choose which forum when you submitted the news.

[DraX]

That'd be quite the impressive hack indeed, then... maybe making some requests oer on the Coranto forums would get Lawrence thinking about it ;-)

[sweetmercifulcr]

I get an internal server error when trying to open cra_vbulletin.pl. It's in my cgi-bin, with my coranto files. It's also chmod'd to 755 (I can't do 777 in the cgi-bin). I'm assuming that I run cra_vbulletin.pl to set the settings, right? The instructions aren't clear on that. Please help.

[DraX]

Sorry, been out of touch for a while.

Just run Coranto, and enable the add-on from the Add-on management section of the Administration page.

[kaotic]

This is amazing! I shall install it now. :D

[blacknight]

I've been trying to get this working for the last couple of hours and am totally frustrated :-(
Connecting to MySql = no problem
However I am not getting either a comments field or anything else on the site's main page.
The new thread is created on the board - but it is empty...

[Dark_Angel2]

This is a great little hack. I've installed it and it's working fine.

I'm wondering if anyone can make an addition to this though? What I want is to use the script as it is but have the comments appear in the news item rather than simply having a link to the thread. Anyone know how? Thanks.

[Jujimufu]

05-04-03 at 08:46 PM blacknight said this in Post #15 (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?postid=391347#post391347)
I've been trying to get this working for the last couple of hours and am totally frustrated :-(
Connecting to MySql = no problem
However I am not getting either a comments field or anything else on the site's main page.
The new thread is created on the board - but it is empty...

I'm having the "EXACT" same problem as this guy?

[KW802]

Any chance that this hack will be updated for VB3? :D

[ixian]

Lawrence is still very active in the Coranto hacking community, so I would say yes.

Even if he doesn't, I plan on modifying it myself once the first RC comes out (I'm not running VB3 yet). The changes won't be too major.

If Lawrence doesn't update by the time the final comes out then I'll just release mine as long as he's cool with that.

[DraX]

I've been working on a CMS package myself and have to update multiple sites that are running on Coranto over to this new system (the CMS is an add-on to vBulletin)... I'm nearly complete with the core functions and am slowly porting my code over from 2.x to 3.0 (I started the project on vB 2.2.9)

I'm sure that Lawrence will be making a 3.0 update for his Coranto integration, as ixian said.

Additionally, because of my own necessities I'll be making an importer that imports posts from CorantoSQL (probably not from default Coranto) into the news database of my CMS (it uses a separate table for news/articles/etc, rather than having them linked to the forums directly), along with associating Coranto usernames with their respective vBulletin accounts.

[KW802]

Ixian, Drax:

Thanks for the info guys/gals. I've got several Coranto hacks and would hate having to switch over to a new system. I'm a new VB user (just signed up a few weeks ago) and went with the decison to start directly with 3.x instead of going with 2.3.x & then upgrading later.

Thanks again,
Kevin

[Taco John]

Did this ever get modified?

[Triple A]

Did this ever get modified?
Also wondering the same. Also, I'm getting this error:

The default settings section could not be loaded. This may be due to an error with connecting to the vBulletin SQL database. If you are just installing vBComments, please ignore this message, click Submit below, then come back to this page!

I'm 100% sure I entered all the information correctly. :-\

[JohnBee]

I am using it w/r 3.0.3

it works, somewhat although its not perfect.
the hack doesn't produce latest thread titles in the forum home
section, everything else works though.

also, I tried the B4 it doesnt show forums in the forum selection
drop down menu I tried to manually add the forum ID's to the
.pl file but it still wouldn't show them so.. its worst the B3 version
as far as vB 3.0.3 is concerned.

I do hope someone updates this hack soon because aside form the
quirks I mentioned above the hack works nicely with vB and adds
a great deal of functionality to coranto's comment features!

[feathers]

I do hope someone updates this hack soon because aside form the quirks I mentioned above the hack works nicely with vB and adds a great deal of functionality to coranto's comment features!
I'm working on it...

[feathers]

Sorry for posting twice in a row, but to expand on the above, I've now finished and released Issue 1.0 of my vBulletin (3.x) Comments addon for Coranto (available here (http://coranto.gweilo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8024&highlight=)).

It ports the existing functionality from the vB2 compatible version and updates it for vB3 allowing comment threads to be created in vB direct from the news editing pages of the Coranto CMS. Additionally, I've added a couple of extra configuration parameters to handle the situation where a table prefix is used when installing vB and also to default the creation of vB threads from each news item.

It's only been tested with Coranto 1.24 and vB 3.0.7 so if there were any table changes in earlier 3.x versions of vB there may be 'issues'. (I also don't know what it will do with 3.5 as I haven't looked at the format for that at all).

[Marco van Herwaarden]

@feathers

Did you ask the original coder permission to use his work?

[feathers]

Indeed I did.

Credit for the original remains with Lawrence, I have simply updated the addon with his permission.

Hello,

As I've stated before in the forums, my addons are all open-source. All I ask
is that I be acknowledged for the original versions. Nothing more :)

It's nice that someone has taken the effort to update vBComments. Thanks.

Have a nice day!

Lawrence

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Great. :D


Thank you for the answer. Are you planning to release your hack also here at vb.org?

[feathers]

Are you planning to release your hack also here at vb.org?
To be honest I hadn't thought about it too much as it's a Coranto mod rather than a vB hack. Given that it is vB relevant, however, I'd be quite happy to release it here also.

As I'm new here, however, I'll need a little time to 'look around' and see how these things are done!

------------------------------------------------

As a quick update, I'm working on a stripped down 'external.php' copy to provide replycounts for specific threads to my Coranto news script. (Not sure if that's the best way to do it but it seems to work). Once that's complete then I'll release a new version of the vBComments 'Coranto Integration' script along with it, both here and on the Coranto pages.