Integration with vBulletin - [ITECH] Inferno External Lite

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[ITech] Inferno External Lite
Created By Inferno Technologies (http://www.infernotechnologies.net)
Copyright 2004-2007
All rights reserved
Project Development Team: Zero Tolerance
Project Lead: Iain "Decado" Kidd
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Project Description

This product is designed to take data from your forum, and easily export it in a HTML format onto any type of website you have (note, the website must be on the same server as the forum). For instructions and features, read on.

Note
we can't provide screenshots of this in use as it would be completely unique to your website, but we have included the acp stuff

Features

Data Feeding
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Inferno External's main purpose is to provide you with the power to easily display data from your forum, to your website, without any knowledge of programming!

Module Blocks
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Creating a data feed has never been as easy, you can simply create a block by choosing what type of data you want to extract, customise it with options, and save, all through an Admin CP interface.

Previewing / Templates
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As with most development processes, before taking anything live on a website you want to preview how it will look. Inferno External gives you a snapshot of how the block will look exactly on your website, with exception to your websites style/css.Customising blocks is no problem at all, either if it's a setting, or how it's displayed. Inferno External employs ITS ("Independant Template System") that allows you modify templates for a block without effecting any other block!

Module: No. Users Online
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This compact version of users online simply displays the numbers of members, guests and hidden users online. You can configure this to only show members/guests or just hidden if you wish, and again hide certain usergroups!

Module: Threads
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This module block can give you a listing of threads from x, y and z forums, kinda like creating your own forum display page! It has all kinds of configuration to handle data exactly how you want: * Max Threads To Display
* Maintain Permissions (So users only see threads they're supposed to!)
* Forums To Scrape (Which forums to fetch threads from)
* Filter Results (Enter custom search terms to customise which threads are shown!)
* Ordering (How you want the threads to be ordered, such as date, poster name, thread title)
* Display Threads From (Ranging from Today to This Month to This Year and more!)
* Titles/Username Cutting (So a long thread title doesn't bombard your style)

Module: Thread Posts
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This is similar to the threads module, only instead of displaying a similar forum display look, it displays the first post of the threads! This could be used simply to show latest threads, custom blogs, or news! Also has extended configuration to meet your demands: * Max Posts To Display
* Maintain Permissions (So users only see posts they're supposed to!)
* Forums To Scrape (Which forums to fetch posts from)
* Filter Results (Enter custom search terms to customise which posts are shown!)
* Parse BBCode (The system cleverly makes sure images such as smilies and links work!)
* Ordering (How you want the posts to be ordered, such as date, poster name, thread title)
* Display Posts From (Ranging from Today to This Month to This Year and more!)
* Titles/Username/Post Cutting (So a long post doesn't bombard your style)

Tutorial On Usage

Inferno External as you know, provides you with the power to export certain data in a visual format to any part of your website. Ideally this is developed around the idea that you the user, wants to display data/information from your forum, onto your main website.

Where do you begin?
The first step is really to set up a new "block", the term block will refer to a set up you've configured in your ACP to export X data, in this example we're going to walk through how you'd set up an External Users Online. The users online has is a very simple interface, for users and guests.

To begin, go to your Admin CP, then 'Inferno External', and on this page you want to click 'Create New Block'. First you will see a drop down menu to choose what kind of block you want to create, select 'Users Online' here then hit 'Proceed'.

The next page takes you to the block configuration, now this block has a few custom options, you can decide what types of online data you wish to display (members, guests and hidden), additionally you can hide UGs from being counted here. There is also the default configuration which you get with all blocks:

Block ID
The block ID is an alphanumeric reference to the block you are creating, it can contain characters a-z, 0-9 and underscores (_). For this example, simply input 'my_users_online', which is a fairly useful ID to give this block.

Viewing Permissions
The viewing permissions is a global setting for all blocks, allowing you to create blocks that can be viewed by certain usergroups, or every usergroup. Don't touch this setting, for our example we want all usergroups to see our new block.

That's it for configuration, you'll find other blocks will have more settings depending on what they are, allowing you to customise them, remember aswell that you can create several blocks of the same type!

Hit 'Save Module Block' and this block will then be saved, and you'll be sent back to the main Inferno External admin page. Here, you should see your newly created block, and we can take a peak too, so click on 'Preview' for your newly created block.

The preview page will give you two things, one is the code you'd need to display this block on any page on your website, and secondly how the block will look. Note that how the block looks will differ, as it depends really on your websites style/css. In the preview here you'll be able to see the users online, all simple.

Hit 'Go Back' to return to the main admin page again, this time click 'Block Templates'. Inferno External employs an ITS ("Independant Template System"). This allows you to create a block, customise the templates for that block, and not have it affect any other block, even of the same types. So for example, if you have two user online blocks, and changed the templates on one of them, it would not effect the other!

If you want to in the future, you can come back to this page and change the templates as you see fit, if you ever make a mistake, simply leave the template blank and it will return to default.

Cool, I have my block, how can I put it on my website?
This is the main part of the system, putting blocks on your website. Firstly, you're website will need to be in php (don't panic!).

What if my site isn't PHP, but HTML?
Not to worry, let's say you have your main site file as 'index.htm' or 'index.html', simply rename the file to 'index.php' and your server will treat this file as php, and still parse your html!

Cool, it's php now, where do I begin?
You need to begin by 'loading' Inferno External into your website, to do this, open say index.php, or any other file on your website that's php and which you want to test (you could even create a test.php if you wish). At the very top of the file insert the following code:

<?php
require_once('./MYFORUM/infernoexternal.php');
?>

Please Note! You will need to alter this slightly, notice the 'MYFORUM' part, this needs changing to your forums directory, and assumes the file you're editing is one level above your forum directory. If that made little sense, not to worry!

Let's say your website is: mysite.com, and your forum is: mysite.com/forums/, and you're editing 'mysite.com/index.php', you'd use the following code:

<?php
require_once('./forums/infernoexternal.php');
?>

Another note, once this has been included in your PHP file once, you do not need to insert the code again, while it won't do any harm, it won't do anything either, this only needs to be at the top of your php files.

Okay, that's done, how do I display my cool new block?
You'll need to enter another peice of code to actually display the block, and that code is the one you saw when you previewed the block earlier in the acp, so run back there and copy that code. Now where-ever you want the block to display, place the code:

<?php echo $infernoexternal->display_block('my_users_online'); ?>

Two things to note here, one is the code I just showed has 'echo ', which the code in the preview doesn't, this command tells php to spit out whatever comes next to the page. If you know a bit about PHP, then you'll be able to tell this function returns the HTML rather than forcefully spitting out when called, so you can use it in other ways rather than just echo. Additionally there are the PHP tags, which are needed so the system parses this as PHP and not HTML/plain-text.

The second thing to note, is the 'my_users_online', and if you're asking yourself "I remember that from somewhere", then yes you do, it's the Block ID you gave to your block. So this is telling the system which block you want displaying.

Now that's done, save your file, upload, and you should see the block nicely sitting on your website where you told it to be, that easy!. You can now manage your block in your admin cp without having to come back to the code and modify it. I should point out that if you delete the block and you don't update the code on your website, your website will return an error message, so if you ever want rid of a block, it's better practice to update your files and strip the code which displays the block, before actually deleting it from the Inferno External admin cp.

Nice, my own block, that was easy!
Very much so!

If you have questions, issues, problems, or anything related, feel free to post and we'll take a look!

Enjoy everyone!

- Zero Tolerance

[Milez]

I am wanting to insert an ad into the text of a post, but only the first post, on my external news page. Will the Lite or paid version allow for this? If not is each post block numbered? If it's numbered I imagine I could hack this in myself fairly easily?

[kleinschwanz]

Originally Posted by Inferno Tech

Hey pewp, could i request that you post your issue in the support forums on the itech website in the first post? Our support agents will be able to help you much faster that way

trying to do so for days but the domain is not reachable... I have some support questions there on my ordered products open but I can't reach the page - so what is that? No answer over the messenger, not reachable over your supportboard and no info at all like an email to your customers or so. maybe you just have blocked my IP or my IP range as it has been before, but at the moment I am not able to go to an internet cafe or use a proxyserver to reach te page even when I can't reach it from home... remember?

well my question here is if I can do someting to break the pages somehow so it will not show a hundred results on one page but on lets say about twenty-five posts and then break the page with an arrow pointing back and forth to browse more efficient... when I show all the posts in the 3d section, the browser will take ages to load those masses when everything is to be shown on one page.

thx for the help

[pewp]

Yeah their support site has been down for almost a month now I think.

So, if these guys don't come back is there anyone that might step up and take this addon over? It was really the only one of its kind and I loved it back when I had it fully functional on my old site. Since I've upgraded to 3.7.x I've not been able to get images to parse, but it still works.

[MarceloS]

My forum is in Portuguese, and when I use this product, the data comes with accent errors. Is there any way to solve that? How could I change the code to UTF-8?
Thanks

[kleinschwanz]

Originally Posted by MarceloS

My forum is in Portuguese, and when I use this product, the data comes with accent errors. Is there any way to solve that? How could I change the code to UTF-8?
Thanks

Try this But make a backup first and read what the requirements are before you start anything =)

[DeirdreBunny]

Originally Posted by RedGTiVR6

I'm interested in using the vBulletin Blogging component....but we need to be able to display these blog posts on our main page for a select number of users (or based on user group).

Would this mod allow us to do that?

I am looking for this info as well. On the mod description it does say the Thread Posts block can be configured to display Blogs on an external page, but I'm just not seeing a blog option in the blocks preferences. I have gotten it to work for recent posts, but not blogs.

Anyone figure this out?

Thanks much!

D.

[RedGTiVR6]

I actually haven't done anything with this. Sorry!

[pewp]

Anyone here heard anything from these guys? The site has been down for quite some time now. I went to purchase the pro version of this in hopes that I wouldn't have the bbocode parsing issues a month or so ago and their site was down. I guess I dodged a bullet there.

[unitedbreaks]

Would DEFINATELY like this to be re-opened!! Excellent mod and so much potential.

[unitedbreaks]

Originally Posted by Fraik

I'm having an issue... trying to create a news block but when I type in the number of posts to display and save it resets again, so its displaying all the posts!

Edit: When just displaying threads the number limit works just fine, it just doesn't work for thread posts

Open infernoexternal/blocks/inferno_block_thread_posts.php

Perform a "Find and Replace"

Find: maxthreads
Replace with: maxpthreads

Do this to ALL found results.

Reupload file. It was a simple variable typo not allowing the post data to save in MySQL.