Latest Blog Feed in Postbit using Carp RSS

[nevetS]

I just posted this over at vbWebmaster Forums (http://www.vbwebmaster.com/forums). I'm all excited because this is my first plugin and I know pretty much nothing about vbulletin. I got the idea from Shawn's forum at Digital Point (http://forums.digitalpoint.com)

I just put this together for 3.5 using carp.

Step 1) Add a custom profile field for the RSS link. In my setup it was field5.
Step 2) Edit your postbit template as follows:
<if condition="$post['field5']">
<div class="smallfont">Recent Blog: $blogentry</div>
</if>
Step 3) Create a new plugin. I named mine: Carp Configuration. Attach it to the "global_start" hook location.
Here is the code:

require_once '/path/to/carp/carp.php';
CarpConf('cacheinterval',120);
/** You may want to set a cachepath specifically for your forum **/
CarpConf('cachepath','/where/you/want/your/cache/files/');
CarpConf('cacherelative',0);
/** You can omit the above two lines without a problem **/
CarpConf('cborder','');
CarpConf('poweredby','');
CarpConf('maxitems',1);
CarpConf('iorder','link');

Step 4) One more plugin. This one I called: Get Users Blog Entry
Attach this to hook location: postbit_display_start

ob_start();
CarpCacheShow($post[field5]);
$blogentry = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();


That's it... away you go. If you don't have carp, you can check it out at: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
I'm not sure if this will work with the free version, as I have the paid version.

I'm thinking about using grouper to set it up so I can parse atom files, but I don't know how important that will be.

Note: carp allows you to enter local paths and http paths for rss feeds. I've tried entering both in my user profile field successfully. You may want to disallow users from entering a local path just to be on the safe side. I don't have any code for that right now, but I'm sure there are some examples for field validation out there.

Carp has an option to store it's output in a variable ($carpoutput), but it didn't seem to work for me. That's why I used the ob_start and end_clean functions. If anybody has any feedback as to how this may be improved, I'm willing to listen.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Thank you for sharing this with us.

Could you please be so kind to copy your instructions into a textfile and upload it to the modification. This is usefull so members can keep the instruction of installed modifications for later use when upgrading for example.

[nevetS]

Thank you for sharing this with us.

Could you please be so kind to copy your instructions into a textfile and upload it to the modification. This is usefull so members can keep the instruction of installed modifications for later use when upgrading for example.
The attached zip file contains the instructions per request.

[Allan]

screen please :)

[nevetS]

screenies added.

[Allan]

screenies added.

thank you :)

PS: I just meant that screen is important for those who are not English as me.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

The attached zip file contains the instructions per request.Thank you for your fast response.

[nevetS]

Thank you for your fast response.
No problem. I'm very impressed at how easy it is to build plugins in 3.5. It took me several hours to put this together, but I'm very new to vbulletin and I didn't know the in's and out's of anything.

In the future for this script, I'd like to add an installer that creates everything for you, but I don't quite know the best way for doing this yet and I'm going to have to add a function to search for the carp files and accepts some user input for location. I'm also not sure if I should just insert the code into the template or if I should just have the users do that themselves.

Before I go that far, I'm going to wait for any feedback about better ways to go about this. If there's a more performance friendly method, I should use it.

Carp is an caching RSS script. Which basically means it will look for a locally cached version fo the rss feed to display first and if one does not exist it will go out and grab the latest version online. The configuration above expires caches every two hours, so if you update your blog it can be up to two hours before the latest blog entry appears. If 10 different people have blogs configured and post in a thread it can mean that 10 different http queries need to go out to display the thread if it has not been viewed in a long time.

Another way to go about this is to set up a cron job to regularly update the cache files, but that could mean that every time it runs 150 http queries go out if you have 150 members with blog entries configured, and it very well could be the case that 50 of those members are not active posters.

These are all reasons to post the plugin here, though. As I get feedback, I can improve the script and everyone can benefit.

[gamebrink]

No problem. I'm very impressed at how easy it is to build plugins in 3.5. It took me several hours to put this together, but I'm very new to vbulletin and I didn't know the in's and out's of anything.

In the future for this script, I'd like to add an installer that creates everything for you, but I don't quite know the best way for doing this yet and I'm going to have to add a function to search for the carp files and accepts some user input for location. I'm also not sure if I should just insert the code into the template or if I should just have the users do that themselves.

Before I go that far, I'm going to wait for any feedback about better ways to go about this. If there's a more performance friendly method, I should use it.

Carp is an caching RSS script. Which basically means it will look for a locally cached version fo the rss feed to display first and if one does not exist it will go out and grab the latest version online. The configuration above expires caches every two hours, so if you update your blog it can be up to two hours before the latest blog entry appears. If 10 different people have blogs configured and post in a thread it can mean that 10 different http queries need to go out to display the thread if it has not been viewed in a long time.

Another way to go about this is to set up a cron job to regularly update the cache files, but that could mean that every time it runs 150 http queries go out if you have 150 members with blog entries configured, and it very well could be the case that 50 of those members are not active posters.

These are all reasons to post the plugin here, though. As I get feedback, I can improve the script and everyone can benefit.


Yes I would like to see some sort of change so that (If 10 different people have blogs configured and post in a thread it can mean that 10 different http queries need to go out to display the thread if it has not been viewed in a long time.) doesn't happen.

Thanks for the code!

[EricaJoy]

Could you kindly make the same sort of thing for vB 3.0.8? It would be very much appreciated. :)

[nevetS]

I have plans on making a single install file for vb 3.5 in the near future, but I don't have an installation of 3.08 up and running right now to play with.

Give me two weeks and I'll see if I can't put both a 3.0x and a 3.5 update together.

I'm also planning on making it compatible with both magpie and carp - since those seem to be the most common rss caching systems out there.

I appreciate the interest.

[memdy]

Everything seems to have installed properly, but it's not showing up in the postbit. Anywhere special we should put the code in the postbit template. I put it just under the title/rank section.

[nevetS]

Are you seeing the "Recent Blog" part of it? Or just nothing at all?

You can place it anywhere you want in the postbit, but I think the place that makes sense the most is right around where the username is.

One thing to keep in mind is the part that says <if condition="$post['field5']"> field5 was in my own personal setup. It could be that your new field has a different number - field6, field7, etc.

[EricaJoy]

any updates?

[irishblacknight]

Nice hack :)

The only thing I found was that if I tried to set the cache to be anywhere other than the default carp cache it refused to work even with the directories set to 777
This is with the GPL version :)

Thanks!

[nevetS]

The only thing I found was that if I tried to set the cache to be anywhere other than the default carp cache it refused to work even with the directories set to 777
This is with the GPL version

I will look into this this week. Last week I was able to make a few changes that allowed the last five blog entries to display into the member profile.

I had originally set a goal to have this all set up as an installable package. I'm not sure if that's an achievable goal, but I'll see what I can do.

[pmkb]

Thanks nevetS, I'm using it with the CaRP free edition. It works fine as it's not using any of the extra features in the commercial edition.

[chabbs]

Thanks for this mod, I installed it and it worked well.

How can I make the link open up in a new page when someone clicks on it? This way people don't leave the forum when reading someone elses blog.

[rollo tamasi]

would it be possible to modify this mod so that it is only availabe to a specific usergroup?

[Brandon Sheley]

could someone please post a link to download carp, that site is extremely hard to navigate, all I done is signed up for some newsletter :(

[armstrong]

Installed on http://noypi.org . Thanks!

Hey, would it be possible to have the blogs on a new window? Someone else requested this, but no solution was offered. Is this even possible with Carp?

EDIT: Answering my own question, yes it is possible using carp's linktarget config option -> http://carp.docs.geckotribe.com/conf/display/item/link.php

[pmkb]

This works great with 3.6 too. :)

[nevetS]

could someone please post a link to download carp, that site is extremely hard to navigate, all I done is signed up for some newsletter :(

You are not kidding. I saw your post and headed over there.

http://carp.docs.geckotribe.com/download.php

It LOOKS like you have to hand off your e-mail to download, but I don't know what happens if you give it to them. When I put this together originally, it was easy to download, easy to install, easy easy easy.

And frankly, since I purchased, they've been great about e-mailing me updates directly and regularly (I don't have to download them).

I know another user has developed a magpie version, which may be easier to get a copy of - here's the plugin, and a link to magpie:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=93457&highlight=magpie

http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

and the magpie rss download page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691

[993ti]

Working great on 3.6.2, thx for this awesome mod ;)

[glenvw]

Ok, I happen to find this at Digital Point as well. However, I cannot figure out in laymens terms, what it does for a forum owner?

Can someone lay it out for me in dummy language please?

Thanks!

[nevetS]

It puts the linked title of your most recent blog entry in the postbit. Take a gander at the screenshots.

[imranbaig]

this is really a nice hack.
Clicks INSTALL

[ResaleBroker]

This worked like a charm with our 3.5.x forums. What would it take to get this to work with 3.0.x versions? I can get RSS feeds to show up but I haven't found a way to get the custom user field into the feed URL. Any ideas?

[nevetS]

No idea. I don't have a 3.0x version to work with. I'll poke around a little bit this week and see if there isn't an easy fix.

[ResaleBroker]

No idea. I don't have a 3.0x version to work with. I'll poke around a little bit this week and see if there isn't an easy fix.Thank you! :)

[roliver]

Hi all, is this a full blog plug-in to VB or just an RSS reader to other blog sites?

[mhdhallak]

Thank you indeed. Just what I needed :)

[imranbaig]

cant process atom feeds, I tried with Gouper but Got confused can any one help pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[nevetS]

ResaleBroker - I'm sorry, I just haven't been able to find a way to get this working in 3.0.x.

roliver - this simply pulls in the latest blog entry title into the user postbit.

mhdhallak - you're welcome :)

imranbaig - grouper is definitely what you need for atom feeds. I'll take a few minutes to see if I can figure that out tonight.

[ResaleBroker]

ResaleBroker - I'm sorry, I just haven't been able to find a way to get this working in 3.0.x.Bummer. Thank you for checking it out. I appreciate your efforts. ;)

[RustedBucket]

Quick question. What's the easiest way to set this so a user has to either be a member of a specific group or have X number of posts before they can use this feature. Thanks

[pcoskat]

Quick question. What's the easiest way to set this so a user has to either be a member of a specific group or have X number of posts before they can use this feature. Thanks

Good question!

[forumrating]

will this work for 3.6.4 version latest vbulletin ?

[nevetS]

I believe it will work with 3.6.4 - I'll try it out tonight (actually I'll be trying on 3.6.5)

I don't know about the # of posts thing, but I'll look into it. If my past history is any indication, don't hold your breath. I get easily distracted sometimes.

[Adam Fletcher]

I am pretty new to VBulletin. Can anyone help me by installing this for me.

I have no idea what to do :(

[djbaxter]

After upgrading to 3.66, my previous blog add-on needed to be redone. I decided to try this one instead, since frankly the previous one was a royal pain.

Works like a charm in 3.66 and seems to get Blogger feeds as well as other normal RSS feeds. Just set up the blogger feed URL as follows:

http://{blogname}.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Of course, if your members encounter any difficulty getting their feeds to show up, you can always tell them to process it through Feedburner and use that URL.

I also couldn't get it to work with custom field paths but it's fine if you just delete those lines.

Thanks, nevetS! :)

[djbaxter]

Question:

Anyone know what I have to do to correct a blog title like the following:

The sad state of Canada?s health care system

i.e., what do I have to do to get it to correctly parse or display "Canada's" instead of "Canada?s"?

[wtricks]

You did not enter the correct format for the My latest blog entry field. Please read the field description for the expected format.

What's the format it expects? I tried my link from feedburner, the link of the rss feed as it appears in the footer of my wordpress blog .. nothing. Thank you in advance ;)

[djbaxter]

I don't use Feedburner but for WordPress it should look like http://www.somenlog.com/feed/

[wtricks]

I used this and 3 other possible links with no use. Here is the code as I have put it in the plugin section. I might have not set the path correctly I assume.

require_once 'carp/carp.php';
CarpConf('cacheinterval',120);
/** You may want to set a cachepath specifically for your forum **/
CarpConf('cachepath','carp/');
CarpConf('cacherelative',0);
/** You can omit the above two lines without a problem **/
CarpConf('cborder','');
CarpConf('poweredby','');
CarpConf('maxitems',1);
CarpConf('iorder','link');

I have the carp folder in : wtricks.com/forums/carp and the cache folder is in wtricks.com/forums/carp/cache ...

Thank you again for any possible tips as how to solve this :)

[Retal]

I will pay 15 bucks via PayPal to the person who will make an installable and working product for vB 3.6.x from this one. If someone is interested, please PM me

[Snider]

I don't even get an error - it just shows the Blog: and no link or text at all.

Any ideas ?


http://www.widewebtalk.com/showthread.php?p=1861#post1861

[djbaxter]

I don't even get an error - it just shows the Blog: and no link or text at all.

Any ideas ?

http://www.widewebtalk.com/showthread.php?p=1861#post1861

Did you create and run the cron job ("scheduled task") to update the feeds?

[Snider]

No I have not as that is not in the instructions to do that I can find.

[djbaxter]

My aplologies - you're correct. That was for another add-on I tried that didn't work properly for me.

If I recall correctly, I had to fiddle with this a bit to get it to work.

Make sure that your Carp Configuration plugin looks like this:

require_once '/full/server/path/to/forum/carp/carp.php';
CarpConf('cacheinterval',120);
CarpConf('cborder','');
CarpConf('poweredby','');
CarpConf('maxitems',1);
CarpConf('iorder','link');
CarpConf('linktarget',1);

And that your Get Users Blog Entry plugin looks like this:

ob_start();
CarpCacheShow($post[field6]);
$blogentry = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

Then double check that the correct field is identified in the edits to your postbit:

<if condition="$post['field6']">
<div class="smallfont">Recent Blog: $blogentry</div>
</if>

In the supplied example, it is field5. For my forum it was field6. It may be different for you forum.

[Snider]

Got it - the second plugin had the wrong filed in it !!!

Thanks

[wtricks]

Yet another hack that doesn't work and no one would know why. I would like to get some thorough installation guide (with all the steps DETAILED, such as creating that profile field for example) and other issues.

It's been weeks since I posted for support and still NO ANSWER.

That kinda does it. Will have to look for something else :(

[irishblacknight]

Yet another hack that doesn't work and no one would know why. I would like to get some thorough installation guide (with all the steps DETAILED, such as creating that profile field for example) and other issues.

It's been weeks since I posted for support and still NO ANSWER.

That kinda does it. Will have to look for something else :(

People post hacks in their spare time.

If you can't get the hack to work that's not their fault.

If you were paying for the hack it would be a different matter, but I honestly don't see how you have any right to complain when something given for free does not work for you.

[Snider]

Works fine for me

[wtricks]

Can you please tell me what changes you made with it so that it works?

I am indeed frustrated since I have tried ALL possible changes people posted in here and it won't work. I am a skin designer for forums and have installed hundreds of hacks that worked. And it's frustrating for me to not be able to install something because of lack of correct code and installation guide. A real installation guide with all steps.

Sorry if I offend, but I paid 160 USD for a script and 20% of the hacks I installed won't work, I won't get support from the developers, who still want to have the hacks nominated, but won't even write a readme file that would take you through all the steps :)

There is surely something people did to make this work, it would be nice if the people with experience in this would tell us, the ones who fail to understand, what to do. That's what I do in my communities and it would be beneficial for this one too.

[BigJimTheLug]

*Nice work, I'll try this. I have the most recent blog entry listed as well, but only using a user's website or blog link.

[vegabond]

Did you create and run the cron job ("scheduled task") to update the feeds?
Could you please tell me how can i set a Cron job for blog entry hack?

No err, just showing:

Recent Blog:

:(

[pmkb]

No chron job is required. It's working fine with 3.6.8.

Make sure you have Carp installed and working correctly before blaming this hack.

[vegabond]

No chron job is required. It's working fine with 3.6.8.

Make sure you have Carp installed and working correctly before blaming this hack.
Carp is installed. And I did not blame this hack :)

What can be the fault? Can u guess?

Thanks

[pmkb]

Not without seeing your site's ACP. I'd suggest double checking the instructions above and make sure that you modified the paths, profile field number, etc. to fit your set up.

[jerrygad]

Sorry for dugging this old topic, but just want to let you all know that this hack working correctly even with 3.6.8.

[gotlinks]

I keep getting this error?

[CaRP] Can't open cache file.

[CaRP] Failed to open file: /home/thrdgami/public_html/bzimage/rss/carp/autocache/58fae8eb72e8579438002f3ea9fd5c09

[CaRP] Can't open remote newsfeed.

[gotlinks]

Here is how to fix this mod! And it works perfect on my forum at www.bzimage.org (http://www.bzimage.org)




First of all download carp from here: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

I am using the free version and it works perfectly.

Unzip the carp archive (zip) and upload the carp folder to your forums home directory.

Upload the carpsetup.php to the same directory as of your showthread.php (forums home) folder.

Run the setup file, it will give you two choices..

1) directory cache and the other.. mysql cache. I am using directory cache and I recommend you to try this one.

When you hit next, carp will install cache folders to your carp/ directory. If you don't see any errors here then the setup is complete, you should now delete the carpsetup.php from the forum home directory and carpsetupinc.php from your forums/carp/ directory. If you encountered any errors here then it's highly likely that you need to change the directory permissions for you /carp folder in order allow the script to create cache directories.

Now the rest of the process is fairly simple.

Open your admincp (vb) and create a custom profile field. It should be Single-Line text box. Click next and fill the fields. Give it an appropriate title/description, i.e:

For title: Blog Feed
For description: Enter your Blog's RSS feed URL here i.e. http://myblog.com/rss.xml

Leave the default value field empty. Change max length allowed for user input to 200. Field should be editable by user, not a private field, not searchable on member list and do not show on member list. Leave the regular expressions field blank. In the Display page option below, set it to Edit profile and click save.

Now add two plugins in your admincp's Plugins and Products >> Add new plugin. For the first plugin: Selected "global_start" as your hook location, give it an appropriate title (can be anything) and paste the following php code in the plugin php code area:



require_once 'carp/carp.php';
CarpConf('cacheinterval',120);
/** You may want to set a cachepath specifically for your forum **/
CarpConf('cachepath','carp/');
CarpConf('cacherelative',0);
/** You can omit the above two lines without a problem **/
CarpConf('cborder','');
CarpConf('poweredby','');
CarpConf('maxitems',1);
CarpConf('iorder','link');


Set the plugin to active and click save. Now it's time to add the second plugin:

Attach it to postbit_display_start as the hook location, give it a title & paste the following code in the plugin php code area:



ob_start();
CarpCacheShow($post[field5]);
$blogentry = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();


Set the plugin to active and click save.

Now open your postbit template:

FIND


<if condition="$post['usertitle']"><div class="smallfont">$post[usertitle]</div></if>


ABOVE ADD


<if condition="$post['field5']">
<div class="smallfont">Recent Blog: $blogentry</div>
</if>


Save your template. Now to test it, go to your usercp> edit profile and scroll down, you will see the Blog Feed option there, add your blog's rss feed and hit save changes. Now go to your forums and look for any of your post.. you will see the latest blog link below your username.

If you encounter any problems then post a message here and I will try to fix it accordingly.

[jamestl2]

OK,
I downloaded this and everything is working great. The only issue I seem to be having with it is the fact that all the blog post titles have all the quote and apostrophe marks replaced with question marks, anyone know why?

[nevetS]

This most likely has to do with the fact that the rss feeds are unicode. Do you have an rss feed exhibiting the problem that I can point to?

I would think that if your forum is displaying unicode and the rss feed is unicode it wouldn't be a problem, but if you have a doctype specifying western characters it will show the western character version - which is usually a question mark, but it depends on the font.

It could be a problem with carp, though.

I may be able to insert a regex to replace the characters appropriately.

[jamestl2]

Well,
my forum I'm using is:
http://www.conspiracy-forums.com/

and the feed for my blog in my postbit is:
http://www.lightningshock.com/feed/

So I'm not exactly sure where the error is turning up.

[nevetS]

I'm just barely starting to look into this - busy work day. I'll get back to you shortly.

[nevetS]

There's definiitely a combination of unicode (UTF-8) (rss feed) and western character sets (ISO-8859-1) (forum page) going on - although I'm actually unsure of a fix at the moment. Looking at the output, there isn't a difference between single and double quotes.

I'll spend some more time this morning checking it out.

[nevetS]

OK - interesting, but not a solution yet -
If you add the following to your carp configuration, it will output the quotes properly -

CarpConf('encodingout','UTF-8');

But - it will only work if the document type is UTF-8, otherwise you get garbled characters.

This is typically done by having a meta tag in the header as follows:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">but that isn't working on my forum. Firefox is still showing the page as ISO-8859-1.

I am a bit concerned that fixing this problem might just break some other things.

There is another option in CarpConf
CarpConf('fixentities',1);but that only seems to fix your opening quote, not your closing quote or the single quote.

[nevetS]

OK... so here we go. Beware that this may potentially cause some problems because we're changing character encoding. I don't know what kind of problems it might cause but there seems to be a lot of discussion about UTF-8 and I personally don't know a heck of a lot about it.

My mindset is to give it a shot, and be prepared to roll back these changes if they affect anything else.

In your carp configuration plugin - the one that has a hook on global_start
add:
CarpConf('encodingout','UTF-8');
Then go into your admincp and go to languages.

select language manager, then edit the US English settings. Change the character set from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and then it should work.

The things I would be concerned about testing right off the bat would be any add-ons you have that involve javascript. I don't think this change updates the database at all, so the underlying database tables probably still have a character set of ISO-8859-1. Try posting and searching text that includes unicode characters - maybe copy/paste from http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

[jamestl2]

Thanks nevetS,

The characters look correct now, I suppose I'll repost here if I notice any other output changes it may have had.

[romanticyao]

this is very useful

[auctionguy]

Anyone tried this with 3.7 Gold yet?

Looks like an awesome hack!

[nevetS]

I use it with 3.7 gold myself. I keep meaning to put out a cleaner update, but it works for me right now so other things keep taking priority.

(cleaner meaning easier install, inherent support for UTF-8 feeds, and atom support)

[pmkb]

... and atom support...

Can this be done with the free version of CaRP? I tried to build a solution using MagPie precisely because this solution can't handle atom feeds. Unfortunately, there appears to be some conflict with MagPie and vB's AJAX code.

[nevetS]

Actually dual magpie/carp support is on my todo list. I know with the paid version of carp (which I have), there's now atom support. I paid for it ages ago and they keep sending me updates.

As far as the MagPie conflict goes - I haven't experienced it myself just yet, but I'll see what happens when I get into it. I'm sure there's something out there that will support atom.

I'll get going on this this week. I'm kind of stumped on my other project right now :), so this might provide enough of a break to get my brain working properly again.

[pmkb]

In that case, you might want to take a look here (around post #21):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=156372

[masterweb]

Just a stupid question: it works with Vbulletin 3.7.2?, if yes must i follow the same instructions on the first main post or there is any update about installing it?...Thanks a lot.

[djbaxter]

Yes. It works with 3.72.

[Piccante]

Can't get this working in 3.7.2 (I previously had it working in 3.5).

Getting errors about a call to undefined function for CarpCacheShow, even though it is defined afaics.

[tormodg]

Works on vB 3.7.2 using the commercial version of Carp. I had some issues which came down to Carp not having access to write to the cache folder (I had set the wrong chmod values).

[jani]

It is not working for me. I am using version 3.8.1 :(

Can anybody please help me how can I get it working with my version?

It was working absolutely perfect but I think when I upgraded the version it stopped working. It is now just saying "Recent Blog:" but not showing the post :(