I am in the process of converting a site that was based on phpBB to vB. The forums are moved, but I need to redo my portal pages. This script looks like a possibility, but I need to verify if it can do the things I need.

* multiple portal pages for a single vB installation (example, a car website might have a main portal page for its home, but then have a Ford page, a Chevy page, etc... )
* selecting more than one news forum for news on one page (this merges the news from the forums selected into one date sorted stream for the news on that page - example, the Ford page might have taurus, mustang, and explorer news forums included in Ford news.
* list of most popular threads in a forum
* list of most recently added threads in a forum
* list of most recently update threads in a forum
* ability to do multiple lists of news headlines per page.

What I need to do is currently in action at http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/i700faq.php and http://pdaphonehome.com

Would this hack be a good base for me to recreate these pages? I don't mind making changes to it to get what I need, I just need a solid foundation.

There are two methods to do this depending on if you want each page to have different new etc for the page.

This requires one minor query edit to use multiple forums.

Not part of the default package, but would be very simple to add.

By default this gets the most recent threads from all forums, however can easily be changed to get them from one forum.

No sure what you mean by this one.

Overall I don't think you would need to make many changes to this hack to get it to do what you want.

Thanks for the quick reply. I was originally looking to use vbPortal for the site, but they don't support multiple portal pages and the system is pretty complex... not easy for me to go in and tweak. The script I used to do the current site was a pretty basic portal script, and so it was very easy for me to go in and make it do what I wanted. I ended up tweaking the queries to do half of what's on my pages.

The part where you didn't understand what I was asking is on the first url that I posted. At the top of the page, I show 2 news items with full text... then there is an xml stream ... then I show the popular, new, and recent lists, then I get to the part that needs explanation.

I added a table with categories. The table has a thread id, a sort number, and the category id. Another table holds the category ids and descriptions. This is for organizing a forum loaded with FAQs. When I display this on the portal page, I loop the news code about 8 times, each time indexing to the next category. I have hard coded the number of loops, and the template variables for each loop. The result is what you see at the bottom half of that url. A list of FAQ titles... then when you select a particular FAQ, it takes you to the thread in phpBB. I've actually altered this a bit as well to go to an article style template on a different page.

Do you think I could figure out how to hack this from the code of vBindex 2.1? I am not that experienced with php and mysql, but I've can usually figure out things if I have a starting point and code that isn't to difficult to understand.

Another question... assuming I do this, how big of a port do you think it would be going to vB V3?

Version 3 of vBindex for vB3 is a complete rewrite, so you maybe better of waiting till vB3 hacks are allowed here if you are planning on upgrading to vB3.

The FAQ listing I think should be pretty easy I think, going by what you have said and what I can see from the page. I don't think it would be too dificult to create some code to efficently create those lists.

I can't really weight, as I am straddling phpBB and vBulletin at the moment. I bought a second site and merged it with mine. Mine was phpBB, the other was vB. I was going to have to do a rewrite of my current site anyway, to upgrade to the latest phpBB, so I decided to go to vB... very impressed so far. I am in a bad spot until I get those pages redone.

I'm looking at this script, vbHomeLite, myvbindex, webtemplates, and vbportal.

Just trying to figure out which will let me do what I want to do the quickest. I would like to create a nearly identical look.. style wise. I could split the pages up though if it would be easier. I don't have to have so much on a single page. I could break up the news from the FAQ, and do those by category. I'd like to create the script this time so that its totally dynamic, because I currently have a separate custom page for each portal. I'd rather pass the device (category) in the url.

Thanks so much for your thoughts on this.

will this work with the latest ver of vbulletin (2.3.0 i think it is)

Yes this will work with all the 2.2.x and 2.3.x versions and 3.x when RC is out :)

OK, Thanks for the quick and friendly help. I have a test page up and running and it is looking pretty promising. I may need some help on some of those queries for the FAQ page. I've done them in phpBB, so I know what needs to be done... just may need you to point me to a few things.

I've played with vbHomeLite and vbPortal. I might be inclined to go with vbHL, but they are shutting down their support site and I don't like that. vbPortal is more complex than I need to get my pages moved over. I really want to just replicate my pages on vB as fast as humanly possible. The simplicity of vBindex is appealing. And, the feature of adding other pages via a new template and url variable is cool. I am going to fool around and see how close I can get the home page here...

Thanks. :banana:

OK, there are a lot of posts in this thread. I have made it about 1/3 of the way through them in several hours, and I've made great progress on replicating my home page... concentrating on that for now.

One thing I've searched and scanned for to no avail is how do I get multiple forums feeding one news stream? I believe you mentioned that it would take a query edit... a tip there would be appreciated.

I also saw mention of renaming vbindex.php, having many of them, and having them point to custom templates. I will most likely eventually get to that... so if that makes it easier to do the multiple forums, then I'd be cool with that... in other words, if I could hard code the forum list at the head of the vbindex-newone.php, that would be OK. And, I assume that I can also hard code the home template that it will use, no?

If someone can help me on this, I might be able to put my main home page up with this tomorrow. I can't stand having my home page driven by phpBB! :lick:

For the news edit find:

and replace with:

And in settings in the ACP for the news forum enter the IDs seperated by commas, for example:

That will then pull the news from forumid 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Depending on how you want you pages to look you maybe able to re-use the same templates for all pages and but have the forum values hard-coded in the file, or if all the templates are the same throughout then just have it set the IDs based on the URL.