Still doesn't work.

It still tries accessing "mydomain.com/news.php" instead of "mydomain.com/forums/news.php"

It works now if I manually enter "mydomain.com/forums/news.php" into my browser. But there are lots of graphical errors. "Posted by:" and "Comments:" use an Alt1 or Alt2 style, but they're on a thead style background, so it's unreadable.

When I click on Comments to view the thread it sends me to "mydomain.com/shownews.php?t=24" for example, instead of "mydomain.com/forums/shownews.php?t=24". So I manually enter the "forums" into the URL and is has the same graphical errors. "Posted by:" "Comments:" etc. are unreadable.

Also, in shownews.php it says "Comments:2" on every single post, and it shouldn't really say it at all, only on news.php.

When viewing news.php, your hack is incompatible with Allow Usergroups to Post HTML hack. I have it set up so that admins can post HTML in any forum they want, but HTML doesn't parse when viewing news.php.

Sorry, I'm uninstalling this because it's not usable at all. It at least works this time around, though. I tried it a week ago with no luck. At least you're making progress!

Good luck.

installed, just for future use !!!

TheMilkCarton, sorry nothing worked for you. All of the features you mentioned not working on your forum work without fail on mine. However it is unlikely this is all due to conflicts with other products. The only reason I can think that your pages still weren't forwarding properly was because you don't have $vboptions[bburl] properly set in your AdminCP.

As for not parsing HTML, HTML does indeed parse if the forum allows - this may also be a result of not having your bburl properly set. I am unfamiliar with the hack of which you speak, but news.php uses forumdisplay hooks rather than showthread/postbit hooks, so the hack would need to be tweaked to work correctly with it. You may not know this, but that hack is a 3.5.x hack (this is a 3.6.x addon), and in 3.6.0, vBulletin Usergroup Permissions include an option to allow HTML by default.

As for the comment numbers appearing on every single page... well, that just shouldn't be happening. Sounds like you were using either v1.0.5 or earlier shownews.php with a v1.0.7 product installed (a number of plugins were hardcoded since then), or you were using showthread.php somehow.

Your readability issues just have to do with your forum's style. In my forum, it's possible to mix and match classes quite easily. You may have had to do some manual tweaking with the <span> tags.

Speaking of making progress, I think this mod is as complete as it's going to get. There have been no confirmed bugs since the last release, and there's actually a lot you can do with it. It's unfortunate that you had to uninstall.

In a few days I was going to release a Download Forum mod that was basically just an extension of this with the word "Article" changed to "Download" and a few interface changes.

You confirmed that this was in fact a bug, but now you're saying I don't have $vboptions[bburl] set properly? Everything is set fine.

This seems to be the problem. However, I'm not sure there would be any reason to tweak the HTML hack to display HTML in forumdisplay, since the only use would be for your hack. Can't you incorporate the showthread hooks into news.php?? As for shownews.php using showthread AND postbit hooks... The actual posts do NOT have postbits when viewing replies in shownews.php and was wondering if this was intentional?? It makes it very hard to see who posted the reply as there is only a very small "Posted By" in the top of the post (which ends up being unreadable white text on a white background), instead of a very large Username and Avatar in the postbit.

I'm running 3.6.4 and the only options for HTML in Usergroup Permissions is under "Signatures". The HTML hack I'm using is still very much needed to enforce HTML permissions per Usergroup.

Wrong again. I completely uninstalled and re-downloaded and installed your hack after you posted about a "small update" a few days ago. The small update at least got it running on my forums, since it didn't work at all before.

Uh, well.. if you're releasing a hack, you might want to make it so that it works on others' forums.. not just yours. That's why I've been posting in this thread letting you know all the problems I've been having. In shownews.php, there's no logic in having Alt1 text in a Thead table cell, it should all just be one or the other.

Sorry if this post is coming across as harsh.. I had posted several days ago about a few of these problems and you had admitted there was a bug and that a fix was on the way, but now you're saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with your hack and it's all my fault, so what gives?

You wanted feedback and I gave it. Instead of first dismissing my bugs as user error, could you please look into it? Just because I have a low postcount and just recently joined doesn't mean I'm incompetent. Your hack didn't even work on my forum until your most recent update, so is it out of the realm of possibility that your product still has bugs?? I have a working forum with a non-working hack, and that's confirmed enough for me.

I apologize in advance for the tone of this post. It's probably coming across more harsh than I mean it to.

The bug I confirmed was that some redirects used $vboptions[bburl] while others did not. I thus changed all the redirects to match. The paths are not hardcoded, so the only way you would still have redirect issues is if news.php and shownews.php are not in the $vboptions[bburl] directory as you have it set.

What you are describing is the template for the article being used on the rest of the comments. This should not be happening since the posts SHOULD have their own postbits, however, if you are not missing any plugins, it may be the result of a postbit check the script runs (that I have removed for 1.0.8) even though this did not cause any problems during testing.

In shownews.php find the line:
and change it to:
I apologize for the alt1 / thead issues, this is easily fixed by a template modification. Just pick 1 or the other, as you said.

As for incorporating the showthread hooks into news.php, this would require including class_postbit.php, which is completely unnecessary on that page.

You seem to be right about the Allow HTML permission. I confused this with the Forum Permissions Allow HTML field, which is much more general. As news.php currently stands, the bbcode_parse_start hook is called, so it is compatible with the hack in that way. Unfortunately, the reason it's not parsing is because the hack uses $post, whereas on news.php, much like on forumdisplay.php the array used is $thread. Original versions of my hack had used $post, but it conflicted with many more hacks that way.

You can modify news.php to work with the Allow Usergroups to Post HTML by doing the following edits...

Find:
Replace with:

Awesome. I'll give all those modifications a shot when I see 1.0.8 released. :)

I might just test this hack out on a clean and shiny Test forum, and try to narrow down which one of my bajillion hacks is causing all these problems with it.

*keeping my fingers crossed*

Thanks for all your help. You made modifying that news.php to work the HTML hack look like a piece of cake. :up:

I doubt your white on white "Posted by:" has anything to do with combining alt1 and thead classes since that would just mean one of those classes is foolishly white on white itself.

This is likely caused by a conflicting setting in the Usergroup Manager:

Username HTML Markup (Specify an opening and closing HTML tag with which to display the names of users in this group. This applies to names that appear on Logged-in Users, Who's Online, Users Browsing Forum, Users Browsing Thread, Posts, Member List etc.)

If this is set to white, that's why usernames are appearing that way. A template edit to change $post[musername] to $post[username] would fix this problem.

Is there a way to allow comments that do not count as posts?

Also, how do I modify the background color (or even remove) under my name when viewing the news forum?

Thank you

That's a template edit. Just modify the class for the tag surrounding $post[musername].

For making comments not increase post counts, you can accomplish this with a vBulletin stock feature.

Open your news forum in AdminCP -> Forums & Moderators -> Forum Manager. Under "Enable / Disable Features," there is an option "Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts." Set this to no.

If on the other hand, you just don't want comments in the news to be returned as post search results or something, that is beyond the scope of this mod, since it was designed as an alternative to journal hacks that didn't count comments as posts.

Just got this email notification:

Ok, but I only wanted my posts to count, but not the comments. Is this possible?

Can you please clarify which template? I tried both news_threadbit and news_postbit

I changed alt1 to alt2, nothing changed

Odd. What do you have set for your Usergroup markup?

And in response to that email notification, a big fat question mark. News.php is almost exactly the same as forumdisplay.php (except you can't sort the news, it's always chronological -- this was done to save some queries), with modifications basically only around the threadbit_display hook. If you get another one of those, let me know.

My admin group (myself) is red colored only, thats the only markup but the thing I'm trying to get rid of is not the font color in the news view, but the background itself which it is not doing between alt1 and alt2 in both templates I mentioned

I don't believe it's possible to give the thread starter an increase in post count and not those who reply. That's just the way vBulletin currently works. You could do this manually by adding another plugin, but it would add 1 query to newthread.php when you click submit. If you don't mind that, I'll write it up for you.

What are the background colors for your thead and normal classes?

P.S. If you are having CSS problems with one template, then you most likely should edit both news_threadbit and news_postbit since they should visually look the same (though functionally they are different), and thus you would be having problems with both.

main css shows this:

alt1
background = #E4E6F5
font = #4D528C

alt2
background = #F5F5FF
font = #4D528C

And uuhm.. there's no in postbit legacy. Only in postbit.

In postbit_legacy it's:
It's the first line in both cases anyway and means exactly the same thing.

I have this mod installed for RSS Feeds:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=118004

The strange problem is, trying to add a "news" thread in my CES mod is redirecting to the above hack:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=137365

So, clicking the actual forum link "Forum News Blog" shown here http://www.talkjesus.com/press-stand/ redirects to the RSS hack, here http://www.talkjesus.com/news.php?f=72

I'm not sure if this is a conflict with vbseo, but any help is appreciated

The first thing that comes to mind is that both hacks use a file called news.php.

Have you renamed either file? Or did you overwrite this hack's news.php with the RSS news.php?

Yes, both use news.php in root folder. Can you please explain how I can do a workaround on yours?

My suggestion is that programmers of these hacks should use their hack name, abbreviated at least in the filenames such as :

newsrss.php
or
newsces.php

This would avoid once in a blue moon conflicts ;)

You could rename my file to newsces.php if you wish, but you would need to edit news.php and shownews.php, search for all occurrences of news.php and replace with newsces.php

Then in all the templates for this hack, do the same.
Also check the plugins.

Thank you for your help. Now, after I left and came back I got one of the common mysql error messages emailed to me, although I cannot duplicate it. I am able to enter the forum, able to create new thread. I did however get a 'page not found' when I clicked on comments link on any of the posts I've made.


Also, is this actually like a 'blog' in a way, news blog so to speak? I'm just curious if that's the intention of the hack. I'm just testing it out in the meantime.

You need to rename shownews.php to shownewsces.php apparently.

And yes, that was the intention of the hack, except I wanted anyone with permission to be able to post an entry in the same blog, and I wanted them to count as posts.

EDIT: To make that Database error stop:

In newsces.php, find:
Replace with:

EDIT: These fixes, among others for bugs that I JUST discovered today, will be included in the next release 1.1.0.

Still getting these errors:

Did you remove $datecut from that query?

I tried this hack out too. I get exactly the same issues as others are reporting i,e, trying to find news.php in my webserver root when my vbulletin forum is in forums/ and yes the white text over the username as well. Rather weird.

Apart from these teething issues it seems a great hack. I wonder if we could have an option to only show the first X amount of words or letters (as a spoiler) with a link to the full article. Long news takes up an enormous amount of space using this hack :)

Still testing but pretty pleased with what i have seen (if i can get both the new option, if possible, and the two bugs squashed).

I did not modify anything, just installed the hack only. How would I resolve this?

Please see post #63. That should solve the issue.

Can someone please explain how to get the COMMENTS box (bottom) to be even width with the above news listing? It is too wide.

Also, how do I remove that extra purple space between the comments box and the new reply button?

My news_comments template is untouched:

You should check your settings for the style you are using. My guess is it has to do with variances in your settings for form/etc. widths.

Sorry, where should I look in the styles exactly? I don't want to mess anything up :)

AdminCP -> Styles & Templates -> Style Manager -> All Style Options -> Sizes and Dimensions -> Main Table Width.

If this is a value larger than you might have specified maybe in the showthread template or something, that's what's causing your problem. I know whenever I change the layout of my site and then nothing matches in width anymore, Main Table Width is usually the culprit.

Is this hack supported anymore ?

And does anybody have any ideas how to limit the output with a readmore link ?

Yes, this hack is still supported, I must have just missed your post in there. I'm a bit confused as to why it is looking in your web server root.

Do you have $vbulletin->options['bburl'] set to your domain name instead of your board url?
For the white text over the username, could you please link to your news section so I can look at that?

Regarding your suggestion for only showing X words or letters, that sounds like a doable addition for the next update, and thank you for suggesting it because I've been holding 1.1.0 back until I could add to the feature list (had been mainly bug fixes).

Anxious to see a demo. How's that coming along? I just want to see what this looks like when the thread has posts and how it looks from a regular user's pov.

More screenshots would work too I guess.

This might be just what i am looking for but i won't install until I can see a bit more about it.

Live demo: http://www.crackedeggstudios.com/news.php

As regards the $vbulletin>options['bburl'] im not sure where to check on that ? But this is the only hack ive installed (have 20+ enabled) that does this ?

Glad you appreciate ideas. I think a limited wordage per news with a read more link would be great. And if possible, a bbcode tag to add to override that limit. So say you set a limit of 50 words per article but on one article 50 won't cut it (needing more), you add a bbcode tag that overrides that 50 words with a user defined word limit for that article. What do you think ?

I will remove the references to the bburl in 1.1.0, but you really should not have any problems there UNLESS AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details -> Forum URL is NOT set to your forum base directory and is instead set to your webserver root.

I'm pretty sure bb-codes weren't originally designed to do that. Doing what you suggest with a tag (overriding a vbulletin setting) may prove impossible without serious file edits, unless it was the tag itself that acted as a setting. :)

My forum url is set correctly so its not that :( I know locally i edited your plugin and removed that bburl code in it and it worked well after that.

As regards bbcode, i actually meant a tag. Could you not get the plugin to look at the body of the text and if a tag exists break there instead of the default in the admincp option of your plugin ? Would seem the likely solution.

So check if $tag exists else $mydefaultbreaksetting ?

Ah yes, much easier if not bbcode related. Maybe using the hook threadbit_display...