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!

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by egyptsons

dosen't work well with Arabic Language

no, sorry, I need to work on that.

[GrendelKhan{TSU]

anyone know if this works with 3.6.6??

[egyptsons]

Originally Posted by GrendelKhan{TSU

anyone know if this works with 3.6.6??

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

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.

So it should work.

[The Bish]

I can confirm that 3.6.6 works. Well it works as well as it did before the upgrade at least.

[MoB Dudditz MD]

When I use this as a vBa column 200px wide, the text does not wrap and there is empty space on the left-nor will it interact with custom css
Any way to get the text to wrap?
Or to control the CSS in order to modify font color?
TY

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by MoB Dudditz MD

When I use this as a vBa column 200px wide, the text does not wrap and there is empty space on the left-nor will it interact with custom css
Any way to get the text to wrap?
Or to control the CSS in order to modify font color?
TY

The problem is in how the style sheet is apply the padding to the list that the feeds are in.

Here's a fix for now. In the file abouttoday.php, around line 1564 AND 1568

FIND:

PHP Code:

$dtodayx = "<ul class='smallfont' ul class='smallfont'> 


REPLACE WITH:

PHP Code:

$dtodayx = "<ul class='smallfont' ul class='smallfont' style="margin-left:-20px"> 


Do the same thing in the file includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php on lines 273 AND 277. You may need to adjust the value of margin-left to get the optimum look for your board. You may be able to modify it so your custom CSS is used too. Let me know how it goes!

Note that once you make this change, you'll need to do a manual refresh (Force RSS Update from abouttoday.php) of the feeds to see the result.

[RichTJ99]

not sure what happened but this stopped working on our site, sort of. It still shows up but the RSS feeds no longer update. Everything stopped updating on April 19th. We updated from 3.5.x to 3.6.5 around April 15th and I was updating templates for a week or two later.

I checked the RSS addies and all seem to be fine. I deleted one of the feeds and tried to add it back but things aren't showing up like before.

Sorry for the spotty descriptions. Any ideas?

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by RichTJ99

not sure what happened but this stopped working on our site, sort of. It still shows up but the RSS feeds no longer update. Everything stopped updating on April 19th. We updated from 3.5.x to 3.6.5 around April 15th and I was updating templates for a week or two later.

I checked the RSS addies and all seem to be fine. I deleted one of the feeds and tried to add it back but things aren't showing up like before.

Sorry for the spotty descriptions. Any ideas?

If you can PM me your site URL along with an admin name and password, I'll see if I can find anything.

[RichTJ99]

Originally Posted by CyberRanger

If you can PM me your site URL along with an admin name and password, I'll see if I can find anything.

:up:

[CyberRanger]

abouttoday is having trouble reading from this site: http://rss.crash.net/crash_18.xml. Let me look into it some more. For now, I disabled that feed on your site.

edit: nope, I was wrong. It's having trouble with anything from http://rss.crash.net/ trying to figure out how to make it work.