vBComments: Coranto News Integration
 

Hi all, before going into detail here, I would just like to thank Lawrence Williams, the developer of this hack/add-on for his permission to repost this here.

He is not an avid user of vBulletin, and created this add-on as a special request. Since I knew that it could be useful to the vb.org community, I asked his permission to post it here.


With that said, a bit of an introduction. Coranto is the continued evolution of a perl news script called NewsPro. It's an incredible news updating script that is used on many sites. Recently, the old developer of Coranto has stepped down from the palte, and the community of users has continued it's development in his absence. you can find the NEW homepage for Coranto, as well as downloading the program and it's Add-Ons, both user-made and community-contributed here.

Coranto itself only requires a server with Perl. This add-on, vBComments, requires the server to have the DBI Perl modules installed with the mySQL DBD package.

vBComments allows you to have your news items posted both into Coranto's text database (or mySQL database, if you use CorantoSQL, another community Add-On) for publish to your front page news, and to a specified forum within your vBulletin Database.

You can choose which vBulletin User the post should appear as in vBulletin, and which forum to use (NOTE: html code MUST be enabled for the specific forum for the news post to appear correctly. You may be able to work around this with a little bit of creative style template use within Coranto and a small amount of Perl knowledge. When I figure it out I will make sure this gets updated in both this thread and in the vBComments distributable.).

It then allows you to have a [Comments] link appear on your news post on the non-vB front page of your site, linking you to the thread. It also allows you to see how many comments have been made, but only if you use the dynamic news include (viewnews.cgi) for inclusion onto your home page (otherwise it would only show how many comments were in the thread the last time the news was updated).

This addition requires NO programming knowledge, and NO changes to your vBulletin installation. There are no changes necessary to Coranto, thanks to it's unique HOOKED Add-On system (which I would LOVE to see in a future version of vBulletin).


As an added note, it is recommended that you create a forum specifically for News Discussion on your vBulletin, and add the usernames of your news updaters to a custom user group that has permission to Start New Topics there, leaving other users with only the ability to reply to threads.

Hack version: 2.03b
vBulletin version DOESN'T MATTER, as long as it's 2.0+
Coranto version required: 4.x (build 29+)

Support for this hack will be provided both here (to the best of my knowledge) and in the Unofficial Coranto Forums

I have had this installed for a while. Good hack if you use coranto.

Vincent]Sounds great. I'll install it when I switch hosts :D

Great. I will definitely use this.

Can anyone provide a link where I can see a demo of this??

Thanks!

I have it on my site.

http://www.racesimcentral.com

The script generates posts into the news forum at the top of here:

http://forum.racesimcentral.com

Good hack and have installed it on my Kiwi Biker site.

Is there any development being done on this hack. I would really like to give standard users the ability th choose which forum the thread is created in.

You can already do that for them by creating multiple vBComments profiles, and setting the user permissions for the profiles to match the users you want to have access for.

Unless you are using one user account (i.e. News System) for your vBComments posts, you'll have to create a profile for them to post as their username in each of the forums you want them to be able to post to. (i.e. vB DraX in News; vB DraX in Community; vB DraX in Support)

I was hoping there would be another way than having to create lots of profiles for each user.

It would be cool if the hack could be written to allow you to choose which forum when you submitted the news.