Display thread as a Blog
 

I banged this out fairly quicky but it does seem to work OK on my forum. Additional testers would be welcome though.

What it does.

Displays a single thread in reverse chronological order as a "blog".

New files: 1
New templates: 2
File edits: 0

Installation.

Copy blog.php in your forum directory.

Create 2 new templates (BLOG, blogbits) using the attached files.

Usage:

http://www.yourforum.com/forums/blog.php?t=12345

Displays thread 12345 in reverse chronological order. If there are more entries than a single page worth then page selection controls will be displayed.

New blog entries may be made by clicking on the Reply icon.

Screen shot?

nice idea, but it'd be better if it's sorted by user, for example, blog.php?u=userid&blogid=blogid

Knew I forgot something ;). It's there now.

Feel free to have at it. This version simply turns a given thread into a blog so there's no need to do the sort, etc.

this works awesome! since i'm putting the blog.php in a frame in a non-vb page, i've deleted the header, navbar and footer (and some other stuff). tom, i've uninstalled the previous version as this one seems to solve certain issues the other one had, i.e. permissions, etc.

this is definitely worthy of hack-of-the-month. it is so simple and useful!

Cool... :) thanks for sharing

The permissions on the CMPS version can be handled directly by CMPS. That is, don't display the module if the user doesn't have permission to see it. More comprehensive checking can easily be added if necessary though.

That said, both the CMPS version and the vb version are probably useful in their own way.

Hummm... this is displaying the quote tags as plain text [QUOTE=xxxxxx]Reading you ....

[QUOTE=Lionel]Hummm... this is displaying the quote tags as plain text You can either redownload the blog.php file (I flipped the last parameter in parse_bbcode2() from true to false) or simply edit your version of the file.

great, works now. I am going to put this in thread tools.

Besides showing the posts in reverse chronological order, what kind of 'blog features' are there ?

it gives the option to get rid of all the bells and whistles : avatar etc... and keep it simple.

can it filter out other people from posting ?

Changing the template to not include the "reply" buttons would be the easiest. After that you can have the thread in a forum the users can read but not post/reply in and the permissions will prevent them from posting.

You can just specify a forum that no one can reply to, and link all posts from that forum to blog.php and have your very own blog forum...at least thats my theory.

ok, i have a formatting question.

i have a regular html page split into two columns. the left column is a frame that has the blog. now my html page has a background ... it's the same background as the blog ... but because it is a frame, the background sits on top of each other and it looks disjointed.

is there a way to make the background of the Blog transparent? if so how?

You should be able to edit the blogbits template.
Changeto and see if that solves your problem.

I have just installed it to test, but nothing is posted, I have to forget something :(

Did you specify a thread to use as the blog? It's pretty easy to overlook when doing it the first time.

has not, I do not have anything to indicate, you to speak about it nowhere in the subject, could you indicate to me or that must be to modify ?

From the instructions...

Usage:

http://www.yourforum.com/forums/blog.php?t=12345

Displays thread 12345 in reverse chronological order. If there are more entries than a single page worth then page selection controls will be displayed.

Did you specify a thread (the t=12345 part)?

yes, but i a white page under IE and firefox

This looks like it has a lot of potential, but is very beta. I put up a slightly modified version at http://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/blog.php?t=2406 but it's virtually unusable in its current state. Are you planning on developing this into a full-blown hack and what would the ETA be on that?

I like people to be able to respond to my Blog, but I would like to see a more blog-like reply system with the number of replies mentioned in the lower right corner, and a link to a separate page with the replies listed.

I'd like to use this to offer my members a forum to write up their own blogs. I have a military website and blogs are becoming quite frequent in the military so I think this could have potential for my site but how would I go about setting up a forum that only displays the threads created there as blogs instead of the normal display?

I see how to make a thread display in the blog format but how would one do it by default in only one specific forum?

bump

Ok, I've got the option in the Thread tools to view it as a blog, but I'm still at a loss as to how I can make it the default way to view the thread in specific forums.

Can't you just iframe it?

Can some one post a step by step instructions on how to install this ?