Ok, I know you guys are all working with the new version of this hack, but I'm still using the original one and I love the results. the newer one just had too much going on. the original hack was simple and did a great job. make a post and mark it to be placed on the homepage. done and simple. I I have it ignore poll posts that have been marked as news. then copied the get news sub and have it ignore all non poll posts using differnt tempates for those.
now I have my news items donw the center, activbe topics off to the side, and polls in a small box to the side. you can vote from there or if you've already voted you see the results. I also added a modified version of the vbportal calendar and remake of the welcome panel.
anyway, just wanted to say thanks for the great any forum news hack. When I'm done with it, it's going to make for a real nice homepage
http://www.ccdv.com/forum/homeindex.php
PS - I'd still like to come up with a nice way to truncate the message without screwing up the vbcode and without this whole second post thing in the new version.
bigmattyh had something that looked like it would work, but I couldn't get it to.