AboutToday - Bring RSS Feeds and Daily Events to Your Site!

What is AboutToday?

AboutToday provides a central place to bring daily items of interest to your forum visitors. It includes two main components: an RSS Reader System and Local Events database System.

Please NOTE: This mod has been modified for vb ver 3.6.4. It should work on vb ver 3.5.4 and 3.6.x.

1. An RSS Reader system where the admin can enter RSS feeds that will then be displayed on the page. RSS feeds can be set to AUTOMATICALLY create threads or be set so that users can easily create a thread from a feed.. Feeds can be read via fopen or cURL.
   
   
   
   
   
   The RSS Feeds are fully intergrated with vbAdvanced and could actually be placed anywhere you want!!
   
2. A database system that can hold unlimited categories of "AboutToday" events. For example, you could have a history category (like a Today in History) with sub-categories for different eras in history. Or, you could have a daily joke or software tip of the day, etc.
   
   The "Add Event" feature is intended to help you if you want for example - Sports: Today in History. With the vb calendar, you cannot have categories and you are restricted with how far back the dates can go.
   
   
   
   
   So with the "Add Event" feature, you could have a category tree like:
   • Hockey
     • Professional
     • College
     • High School
   • Football
     • American Football
     • The Rest of the World (Soccer)
   • Baseball
   
   with the normal calendar feature, you cannot have categories. And with "Add Event" you can have any date. So, if you want an event like "Jan 1, 132 B.C. - the first ball was invented", you can do that. But, that isn't possible in the normal calendar. Also, the events in "Add Event" are fully searchable.

Installation

Copy the following files to your server in the forums directory:

abouttoday.php
includes/class.csv.php
includes/class_abouttoday.php
includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php
includes/xml/bitfield_abouttoday.xml
includes/xml/cpnav_abouttoday.xml
admincp/abouttodayadmin.php

From the admincp, import the product file product-abouttoday.xml (Manage Products - Add/Import Product).

REFRESH your admincp window. You should now see a listing in the left column of the admincp for "AboutToday".

Getting Started

NOTE - if this is a new install, a Yahoo RSS Feed and CNN Entertainment Feed have been automatically added to give you a feel for how the product looks.

If you plan to use the RSS Feeds:

1. From the admincp, select AboutToday - RSS Feeds. Add an RSS Feed.
2. From the admincp, select Usergroups - Usergroup Manager. Add permissions so the Administrator group can use the product.
3. From your forum directory, bring up the file abouttoday.php.
4. If you want the feeds to AUTOMATICALLY create threads, go to admincp - abouttoday - settings. There you must set the userid of the account to use to create the thread. Then, edit the RSS Feed with the forumid of where the threads for that feed should be created!

If you plan to create your own "today in history" type of database:

1. From the admincp, select AboutToday - Categories. Add a category.
2. From your forum directory, bring up the file abouttoday.php. "Add" your first event to the category you have created!

Version Status
I've tested this product extensively but ... use this totally at your own risk!

Credits
I learned a lot about how to code this and used a lot of the code from what Ron1n did with ecDownloads. What I've learned from his code while helping to support ecDownloads has been invaluable.

Sites Using this Product
Visit www.armchairgeneral.com to see this product in action.

Click Install!
Please Click Install if you are using this product. Thanks!

[johnstires]

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

The RSS feeds are updated by the vb scheduler. Also, when the AboutToday page is loaded, a check is run. The question is really how busy is your forum. The scheduled task will only run if folks are visiting your site. If not, then the feeds are probably being updated when abouttoday.php is called. There's not much of a way to speed that up. Instead, you may need to increase the update time until the site has more hits.

If instead, your site does have a lot of traffic ... check each feed to make sure the url is still valid. A bad url could slow down the update process.

My site is currently very small, as it is a private site for me and about 15 other friends. I set each feed to update every 5 minutes. The cron runs every 15 minutes.

My site is still horribly slow, like 5 minutes to load. Please help.

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by johnstires

My site is currently very small, as it is a private site for me and about 15 other friends. I set each feed to update every 5 minutes. The cron runs every 15 minutes.

My site is still horribly slow, like 5 minutes to load. Please help.

Please follow what I've already recommended. 1) Set your feed refreshes much higher. For a site that small, I'd go to at least 120 minutes. 2) Check each feed to make sure that each url is still valid.

Once you do that, if abouttoday.php still loads slowly, send me an vb admin login and password (via PM) and I'll check it out.

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by reteep

Scheduled task fails, the smarty path is apparently wrong, where can I change it?

Thanks!

Are you sure that all the product files have been uploaded? Otherwise, I'm a stumped on this one. Can you PM me a vb admin login and password along with your site URL?

[johnstires]

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

Please follow what I've already recommended. 1) Set your feed refreshes much higher. For a site that small, I'd go to at least 120 minutes. 2) Check each feed to make sure that each url is still valid.

Once you do that, if abouttoday.php still loads slowly, send me an vb admin login and password (via PM) and I'll check it out.

Oh, I thought you meant increase the frequency. I'll give this a try. Thanks for your quick support!

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by johnstires

Oh, I thought you meant increase the frequency. I'll give this a try. Thanks for your quick support!

Be sure to check the validity of each feed too! Also, you may want to stagger the frequency. For example, if you have an news source that is updated often, set that to 60 minutes. If you have another site that is updated only daily, set that to a higher number, like 360 or so minutes.

In my next release, I'll probably only have feeds updated via scheduled tasks so that user's don't notice any delay in these kinds of situations.

[johnstires]

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

Be sure to check the validity of each feed too! Also, you may want to stagger the frequency. For example, if you have an news source that is updated often, set that to 60 minutes. If you have another site that is updated only daily, set that to a higher number, like 360 or so minutes.

In my next release, I'll probably only have feeds updated via scheduled tasks so that user's don't notice any delay in these kinds of situations.

Your solution helped, but I still see it going slow sometime and faster at others. I'll tinker around with the settings a bit more.

A scheduled task would be awesome. Thanks for this great hack!

[teedizz]

Can you please explain to me what " How many rows across for $myfeeds variable? " means exactly? Im not good with code talk...lol....ive read the dewcription but im still confused as to what that means. Thanks.

[teedizz]

I installed you RSS feed mod & everything works beutifully, Im VERY pleased with your work. I ran into one problem tho & was wondering if you could help me with it. Basically, everything works great until I try to create a thread from the feed itself to open a discussion in the forums. I end up getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: verify_bs_opponent() in /home/virtual/site1/fst/var/www/html/streetz/includes/visionscripts/psionic_bsh/threadfpdata_presave.phpon line 3

when I go to line 3 of that php file it reads:

$bsh_status = verify_bs_opponent($this->registry->GPC['bsh_opponent']);

I contacted VisionScripts about the error & they asked me to contact the coder of the hack first so thats what Im doing. Thanks alot for any info.

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by teedizz

Can you please explain to me what " How many rows across for $myfeeds variable? " means exactly? Im not good with code talk...lol....ive read the dewcription but im still confused as to what that means. Thanks.

The $myfeeds variables let you place summary information from your RSS feeds on ANY page and ANY place you want if that page is vb powered (ie global.php is called). Here is a good example of what you can do: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=215

I really should have called that "columns" across. If you set it to two and you have two feeds assigned to $myfeeds, you'd get this:

feed1 feed2

If you had it set to 1, you'd get:

feed1
feed2

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by teedizz

I installed you RSS feed mod & everything works beutifully, Im VERY pleased with your work. I ran into one problem tho & was wondering if you could help me with it. Basically, everything works great until I try to create a thread from the feed itself to open a discussion in the forums. I end up getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: verify_bs_opponent() in /home/virtual/site1/fst/var/www/html/streetz/includes/visionscripts/psionic_bsh/threadfpdata_presave.phpon line 3

when I go to line 3 of that php file it reads:

$bsh_status = verify_bs_opponent($this->registry->GPC['bsh_opponent']);

I contacted VisionScripts about the error & they asked me to contact the coder of the hack first so thats what Im doing. Thanks alot for any info.

Well, I gotta say VisionScripts is passing the buck. I don't know what the product is but apparently they've had you change a vbulletin file. The create threads feature in abouttoday uses the datamanager. For it to fail, it sounds like you've modified (or the VisionScript program) has modified a file used to create threads.

I'm afraid the error clearly belongs to them, as it is being caused by a call to one of their functions (verify_bs_opponent). What you need to find out is what file contains the function that is being called, then I can help you with placing an include for that file.