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!

[YabbaDabba]

About half way done reading the comments in here. <<phew>>

Congratulations on such a great add-on and the wonderful support. :up:

I see most of my concerns have been mentioned before, so just count my comments as checkmarks on the "ideas" list.

RE: the broken article displays, at least one of them is due to the double quotes issue. I will try your fix.

I have another that breaks on this line: "Amigos de los Ni?os"

The ? causes the rest of the article and the rest of the feed to disappear.

I can send you more info if you need it.

[YabbaDabba]

Originally Posted by YabbaDabba

RE: the broken article displays, at least one of them is due to the double quotes issue. I will try your fix.

I guess the problem I am seeing is a variation that hasn't been addressed yet. The article/feed is broken when I'm looking at a particular feed in abouttoday.php.

Removed "html_entity_decode" but that didn't have any visible affect on the article display.
Went the extra mile and did:
1 - deleted feed with double quotes.
2 - forced update
3 - updated abouttoday.php with your fix
4 - added same feed (with double quotes)
5 - forced update

Display in abouttoday.php Summary View was the same, i.e., the article terminated at the first double quote.

And just to be clear, these uni-sex double quotes (") are okay and these directional quotes (“ and ”) are not.
Not sure what characters these (“ and ”) are, perhaps Unicode 201C and 201D?

I also have some weirdness like Let?€™s displayed in the articles.
It is in the feed as Let’s (a right single quote?) and vB RSS Mgr displays it as Let’s (also a right single quote?).

Any suggestions or pointers?

This is the last hurdle before I can release this for use on our forums.
A multi-byte(?) character in one article can screwup not only AT's handling of the article, but AT's handling of its feed (and on occasion, a neighboring feed as well).

[YabbaDabba]

I didn't like the "Talk About It" button at the end of headline because different headline lengths made the button's position look random.

I wanted to move the "Talk About It" button to the bottom-right of the article cell in abouttoday.php. That way, when displaying multiple articles from a feed, all the buttons would line up neatly.

The Talk ABout It button is defined in template histtd_talkit_bit and called in abouttoday.php via $talkitlink at about line 1975.

First remove $talkitlink from its present position next to the title:

OLD:

$dmainx .= "<tr valign=\"top\"><td class=\"alt1\" valign=\"top\" align=\"left\" width=\"100%\"><ul><li><a href=\"" . $rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["LINK"] . "\" target=\"_blank\">" .$rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["TITLE"]. "</a>".$talkitlink;

NEW:

$dmainx .= "<tr valign=\"top\"><td class=\"alt1\" valign=\"top\" align=\"left\" width=\"100%\"><ul><li><a href=\"" . $rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["LINK"] . "\" target=\"_blank\">" .$rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["TITLE"]. "</a>";

And move it to a new position at about line 1682

OLD:

$dmainx .= "<br />".iif($maxlengthevent>0,substr($rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["DESCRIPTION"],0,$maxlengthevent)." ...[<a href=\"" . $rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["LINK"] . "\" target=\"_blank\">more</a>]",$rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["DESCRIPTION"]) . "</li></ul></td></tr>";

NEW:

$dmainx .= "<br />".iif($maxlengthevent>0,substr($rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["DESCRIPTION"],0,$maxlengthevent)." ...[<a href=\"" . $rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["LINK"] . "\" target=\"_blank\">more</a>]",$rss_channel["ITEMS"][$i]["DESCRIPTION"]) . "</li></ul><div align=\"RIGHT\">$talkitlink</div></td></tr>";

where RIGHT can be LEFT or CENTER also.

In the final, I also took out the ul and li tags, but that's just my preference.

The result is much cleaner looking to my eye.

[YabbaDabba]

These were recommended to me. I am simply passing them on should anyone find them useful.

A tutorial on character code issues
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html
Excellent

Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues
http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets
Pretty good overview of common issues but some gaps in coverage.
Has good list of resources at end too.

[ForumDrop]

Just installed this on one of our Forums, but I keep getting this error code:

XML Error: not well-formed (invalid token) at Line 1

Thoughts?

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by YabbaDabba

These were recommended to me. I am simply passing them on should anyone find them useful.

Thanks for the detailed comments. I really need to recode a lot of this. As you can see, it's been a long time since I did an update. Now, just to find some time!

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by ForumDrop

Just installed this on one of our Forums, but I keep getting this error code:

XML Error: not well-formed (invalid token) at Line 1

Thoughts?

At what point do you see that error? If it's for a specific feed, what's the feed? If on install, I'd suggest you re-download the zip file, extract it, and re-upload all the files to your server and re-import the product.

[YabbaDabba]

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

I really need to recode a lot of this. As you can see, it's been a long time since I did an update. Now, just to find some time!

If I may be so bold, I would suggest that the next priority/release should be:

1 - Handle feeds well
This includes "odd" double byte characters in feeds (e.g., “, ”, ?).

This is so critical, I'd ask that this be done before anything else is touched. Make this change and AT becomes instantly useable.

[mccollin]

I've had this installed for a long time, and all of a sudden it has started generating the following error - "XML error: junk after document element at line 2". Anyone else run into this, or have an idea what could be causing it?

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by mccollin

I've had this installed for a long time, and all of a sudden it has started generating the following error - "XML error: junk after document element at line 2". Anyone else run into this, or have an idea what could be causing it?

One of your feeds is providing invalid data. Take the url of each feed and pull it up in your browser. The bad feed should become evident. You can also disable a feed in turn, force an RSS Update as you disable each one, until the error stops.