Forum Headers Hack
 

The idea for this hack came from the desire to increase forum traffic. What I wanted to do was subscribe individual forums into webrings. The problem was each forum would have to have the webring code within that forum page.

So I began writing this with the idea of just enabling webrings for a forum, but saw that it would just as easily be useful for adding custom HTML headers to individual forums.

What this hack does is allow you to specify an HTML code as a header for a specific forum. From the Admin CP, you specify whether a forum should have a forum header, if it should be guest only or not (I didn't want to bother registeres users with the webring banner), and then a text box for entering in the HTML

You can view a sample forum header at my site:
http://www.fasherman.com/forums/foru...php?forumid=27

I've also included a screen shot of AdminCP

Here is the screenshot of AdminCP

OK, I like this idea, it would allow you to add any type of customised content to the headers in your forums, cool idea, very cool.

I might have to install this one soon. (useful for sponsors messages :):):))

Here's another example of how I'm using this:

http://www.fasherman.com/forums/foru....php?forumid=4

When you hit that forum, you'll see the webring graphs (pending), but registered users don't see it. They have no idea that I'm adding the forums to webrings to increase traffic.

The idea could easily be adapted to use/limit banner adds for user classes.

i run a big site with 10,000 members, will this put alot of extra load on the server?

I would imagine not significantly more than is already typical. It adds only one query to forumdisplay.php, so really no more than an additional thread being added.

I believe PPN already released something like this.

I don't think so. Remember, this isn't designed for banner ads. You can use it that way, but the HTML code will have to handle aging, rotating, etc.

All this hack does is add a customer header and footer to each forum. I just updated the install file to include adding footers too.

It gives anyone the ability to do what http://www.sitepointforums.com/ has done without having to do it as a template hack that makes each forum the same.

I think I'll be installing this one when I get back home, I can add more (And Varied) Meta tags, and have different main banners for each forum, correct?? If so, this would be something I'd be interested in, but I just don't tust hacking when I'm away from home... :) But I'll click install anyway, b/c this is a definite hack I'd like...

Thats correct. I updated the sample forum to show a footer as well.