CommBull (Community Bulletin)
 

vb3.5 Commbull
vb3.6 Commbull

Note:
The 3.6 version is a commercial product, any queries on it should be submitted to: vb3.6 Support Site

THIS THREAD IS FOR SUPPORT FOR 3.0 VERSIONS ONLY. PLEASE VISIT THE APPROPRIATE FORUMS (links above) FOR THEIR SUPPORT

[valid point]
it's been brought to my attention that not everyone knows what this is ... fair enough: This hack is considered a "weekly newsletter" by the fact that it will email members (only sent by an admin) who have opted to receive it new posts, hot threads, etc ... basically a summary of what has been going on since the last time the newsletter was sent out. However there is a vast number of options, and I won't go into detail of all of them ... you can view the the images that I've attached, but u will only get a full idea by installing it.
I would say that there is 0 risk of this installation doing any damage to your current install as these are the changes that it does (manually and automatically):
- change profile.php and admincp/index.php
- add a couple columns to user table (receivebulletin and receivebulletin_type)
- add some phrases to phrase table (receive_email_from_commbull, type_email_from_commbull, newsletterformat, commbul)
- add a row to datastore table (commbull)
- add some html to nav template for admin side
So, if you are unhappy with the install. you can just ignore that it's there and it'll never cause any problems ... your next upgrade will overwrite any changes to the index and profile pages and the extra columns in the DB won't be an issue

[mods that i've added from vB2 version]
- to change languages, comment/uncomment line 22 and 23 to switch from English to German
- save prefs (option)
- skip to page X in case of mailout freeze
- auto redirect to next page (option)
- adding personalized text to top of newsletter w/out searching through the two text & html fields ... u'll c what i mean :ermm:

[INSTALL]
drop the 3 files into the admincp directory and then go to admincp/commbull.php ... follow the instructions and you are good to go.
If you find that the option isn't showing up on the control panel after the install, then it's because you aren't using the default phrases. Go into phrase manager, search for 'commbull' and update the fields appropriately.

If something goes wrong, don't worry .. it checks for already completed updates to the database to avoid redundancy ... enjoy!!

Very nice, i will use this :)

(One little typo on the third screenshot -> "Number of hreads to include [...]")

is a screenshot of the email available?

Ignore: Read it wrong.

Installed and working 100%.

Well done.

One problem when it posts the final bulletin to the forum.

Its all over the place and it sticks huge gaps between the sections.

I just found another problem in the HTML vesion (text version is fine):

In the "user info" section it reads "New Info:" instead of "User Info:" and I cannot find this phrase anywhere. I have looked through both PHP files.

So am I to understand you are now useing vBulletin to handle the phrases, I certianly hope so. I only got V,s when I tried the beta install. If you are then I'll give it another try.

Just gave it a shot, even though I already had parts left from beta installed. Installation went smooth with no errors. Best part is it all works great, but I think I may want to customize the html email format. Great job, definately worth the effort to install this

HTML post to forum: vB adds <br /> after each /n /r even when viewing HTML, but i think i've repaired that

HTML version: hmm, i'll look into it. It might be that i grabbed the phrase (or combination of phrases) from the vBphrases ... yup, found it! thanx

vb phrases: i'm using both, same as before. I use vB phrases wherever i can, but it didn't want to enter the data directly into the DB because of possible conflicts and different configurations between each user's vB.

Note: found a glitch with the saving of features ... recommend updating all three files

perfect work .. thanx grandeur!

Superb work grandeur_69. I was waiting for this :cool:. I'll add to my install list.

Is there an easy mod to make it auto click the next page button? in the last one there was and when you have 30,000+ members that next button becomes a task - thx!

I get this error:

Invalid SQL: SELECT a.dateline, u.username FROM adminlog a LEFT JOIN user u USING(userid) WHERE action='sent bulletin' ORDER BY dateline DESC LIMIT 0,1
mysql error: Table 'XXXXX.adminlog' doesn't exist

and on install it errored on the top 2 commands

User table altered... Failed (Possibly already updated)
User table altered... Failed (Possibly already updated)
Phrase table updated (profile.php 1 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (profile.php 2 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (profile.php 3 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (admincp/index.php) ...Already Update

Mikey ...
1. - to your first post, yes ... you didn't look hard enough because it's an option.
2. - why don't you have an adminlog, it's part of vB3?
3. - that's normal if u've tried to install it twice, or you had it installed with vB2

weird - I don't know now that you mention it - anyone have a tutorial or way to rebuild adminlog - and yes I had it in VB2

What does this hack do?

Thanks.

good point ... guess it's an assumption by people who've been around vB for awhile. I'll post it in the first post.

Great stuff grandeur!.. installed :)

any idea why I'd get this error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: html_entity_decode() in /home/httpd/vhosts/bakermedia.com/httpdocs/learn/admincp/commbull.php on line 554

when I hit Preview Mailing?

yup ... u have a version of PHP < 4.3 ... didn't realize that this function was part of such a recent build ...

try it now (have to say try, cuz i don't have a version less than 4.3) ... just grabbed what someone wrote specifically for this reason on the php.net site

I rrepleced the ones I had uploaded - Now Im getting this:
Parse error: parse error in /home/httpd/vhosts/bakermedia.com/httpdocs/learn/admincp/commbull.php on line 1383

my bad ... uploaded the wrong file ... not very good at multi-tasking, i guess

well, there is one unnecessary query I found in profile.php

instead of doing this
do this

and, i'm sure you will find others. As i've been putting it together piece-by-piece and working out bugs, i haven't done a lot of optimizing.

works now for me, thanks!!

User table altered... sucessfully.
User table altered... sucessfully.
Phrase table updated (profile.php 1 of 3)... sucessfully.
Phrase table updated (profile.php 2 of 3)... sucessfully.
Phrase table updated (profile.php 3 of 3)... sucessfully.
Phrase table updated (admincp/index.php) ... sucessfully.

You may now proceed to use the Community Bulletin Script

In order to allow your users to unsubscribe from the bulletin, you will need to make the following alterations to your existing code and templates:

Upload admin/index.php and profile.php to your server, then go to your Admin CP and look for the "Send Community Bulletin" option under "Users" If you find that the option isn't showing up on the control panel, then it's because you aren't using the default phrases. Go into phrase manager, search for 'commbull' and update.

done all changes, could not find send community bulletin in users section, searched in phase manager for commbull and got this

No Phrases Matched Your Query

whats gone wrong????

iam running PHP v4.3.5

be sure to check "Phrase Variable Name Only" when searching

i tried sending to 3 ppl and it timed out

Cheers that work great

Doesn't work for me. I click "preview mailing", it looks like it's processing, but after 1-2min the browser status bar says done and the page hasn't moved or done anything, no preview.

bizarre. Can't say i've ever had an issue like that. This happen more than once? What browser/OS are you using? Did u view the source code to see if anything was printed to the screen?

winxp, firefox, it's a very large forum (not sure if that matters)

interestingly enough I did successfully install and use it on a few other smaller forums, so I am at a loss too. Nothing prints out, it stays on the newsletter config screen. It looks like it's loading for 1min and then just stops, never getting off the config screen.

size of the forum would only matter if the server that you are hosting on can't handle the load properly. But, the preview pain is not a very complicated query window, so it shouldn't freeze there. I've had the mailout itself freeze a few times with large (> 10,000 members) and with small ones alike, but it's never froze at the preview stage.

quick question regarding this hack

if i edit the preview html window to add a few things, is that saved and sent out to all?

i tried it and it only seemed to work for the first page of emails that it was sent to, after that anyone who recieved the email got the un-edited version.

did i do something wrong? any suggestions? is this how the script works?

would we be able to re-work this so it is possible to send out custom information on top of some of the recent threads, most viewed threads etc.

installed and went very smoothly, even the preview works fine, however i have to wonder, if you save the css as a file will this mess up?

trainer: the same html should be sent to everyone as it's passed into a form field after each submit

sabret: u could manually do it with your own, but most people have the css saved in the DB instead of having vB create a file. Therefor, to keep the css set to each client's current vB settings, it must be printed out in it's entirety.

ok put in the edit text box on the main setup page, one thing is $username didn't work. in the actual email it is blank.

i tried to explain in the text field that if you want something like current date, then the variable u input will be like: $date .. however, if you want something that is created dynamically with each email, you have to use /$username

I have installed everything, it seems to work fine except for this:

#1 When creating a newletter to go out, and its sent out, I don't get it and neither does anyone else...

#2 When I go back to View Installation Instructions I see this at the top of the screen:
User table altered... Failed (Possibly already updated)
User table altered... Failed (Possibly already updated)
Phrase table updated (profile.php 1 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (profile.php 2 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (profile.php 3 of 3)...Already Update
Phrase table updated (admincp/index.php) ...Already Update

Now is it not working because the User Tables is screwed up and if sooooooo What must I do to correct this?

Thanks