Logician NEWS: Drag Any Message to Your Main Page

This is a news script which will drag vb forum messages from your vb db to your non-vb main page/news page. There are a lot of good news script around but I needed a highly customizable main page news script with some special features and wrote it myself. I'm using it in my site's main page for a long time, but I was just too lazy to write installation/help documents to share it here, sorry!

FEATURES:

* This script simply pulls forum messages which you marked as "news" from your vb database and post them in your non-vbulletin (main/other) page.
* You can mark messages as "NEWS" in any forum you want (including private forums). You dont need to restrict your news to a specific forum.
* You can drag any message to your main page, regardless of its date. So news is NOT supposed to be the most recent messages in your board.
* You do NOT have to carry the whole message to your main page as news. You can import it all or simply take some part of it. So eg. you can drag a message's the first paragraph to your news page and link the thread for "Read More".
* Moreover you can insert invisible custom NEWS text which will be dragged to your main page to your board messages, but not shown in the original forum thread. So your original thread message and news text on your main page can be different than eachother.
* You can have sticky news in your main page (even if they are not sticky in your forum).
* News does NOT need to be the first message in the thread. You can tag any reply message as news and pull it to your main page either.
* Script parses ALL of your message icons/smilies (including your custom add-ons) and some of the important vBCode like: [url] [email] [img] [b] [i] [u]
* You can specify which members may post news.
* You can form your News' title seperately, apart from of the original thread/message title.
* You can set maximum number of news shown in your main page.
* You can set maximum number of characters that all shown news should not exceed. Some messages can be long and some can be short and if you set a character limit, the script will automatically compile enough news from your database to fit your web page's relevant part according to the limit you set.
* You can enable/disable:
News Poster Name
News Date
News Read Number
News 'Send to a Friend' Link
Comment number/Add comment button/Last commenter
Will viewing news increase the original thread's view count or not
News is sticky or not
for ALL your news INDIVIDUALLY.
* All news tags are invisible in the original thread. So forum readers do not notice any difference when you tag a message as news.
* Dragging a message to your main page as news is as simple as inserting a hidden [news]Title of My News[/news] tag to your forum message.

Well, these features are what I needed in my news script, so it should suffice to you too!

It's an easy to install script and will work with ALL vbulletin versions because it's an add-on, not a hack. I can give support as much as I have time, but please ask here, not via email or PM.

If you use the script, please click INSTALL. If you post the URL of your news page after installation, you can help other users see the script in action in different pages and in custom designs, thank you!

Logician

[Logician]

Originally posted by GTGT
Thanks for the answer. I am hesitant to change my database though. Hmmw, what eould you think of this hack:

#### Subject Preview by DR2000 ####
I looked at all other hack avaliable for this, and all of them are trying to do too much by editing your database structure, and modifying the way data is inserted. Why overcomplicate things, when all data is already there, and it only needs to be extracted...

I don't know, I did not use it. If you are only pulling titles, etc. from your db, its explanation might be true, you can pull it from db. But my hack has advanced features like customizing the post while dragging, pulling only some part of it, marking a post as news instead of thread's first message etc. and it would require db alteration if your db is large.

[GTGT]

OK. Ill see if I'll change the database. We'll see.

[GTGT]

Is there a way to revert the database changes? Also will the search results be changed when you search?

Also how much faster will it be?

[Logician]

Is there a way to revert the database changes?

Yes of course. To revert it you need to delete the "news" column in "post" table. Also don't forget to revert script modifications of the advanced installation or you'll get db errors when you send a news post.

Also will the search results be changed when you search?

Question is not clear to me. Neither the advanced installation, nor the hack itself has nothing to do with vb's searching feature. So what do you mean?

Also how much faster will it be?

I can not give you a maths formula but all I can say is this: it will be dramatically faster compared to basic installation considering the fact that you have a large db.

In basic installation when the scripts runs, it goes through the entire post table, checking all posts in your database and looks for the hack tags [news] in posts. Think about how long it will take if you have 100.000 posts with each 1000 characters in it.

When you apply advanced installation, hack will tag news posts in column news in database and the script will only check for the tagged messages and will not look inside the posts anymore. So the result will be returned very fast.

Hope this helps..

[downsouthern]

For step 3, exactly where do we add the VB codes?

[Logician]

Originally posted by downsouthern
For step 3, exactly where do we add the VB codes?

Admin CP/Custom vB Codes/Add

[Trigunflame]

Um im staff on www.animega.net and were using the main news for that site, from a category at www.tokyoforums.com I changed the serverdomain from localhost to the ip number but it says this

Warning: Access denied for user: 'vbbforums@thunder8.cwihosting.com' (Using password: YES) in /home/animega/public_html/newsconfig.php on line 25

Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Access denied for user: 'vbbforums@thunder8.cwihosting.com' (Using password: YES) in /home/animega/public_html/newsconfig.php on line 25
Couldnt find MYSQL!

any help? or imma have to go back to coranto

[Logician]

Originally posted by Trigunflame
Um im staff on www.animega.net and were using the main news for that site, from a category at www.tokyoforums.com I changed the serverdomain from localhost to the ip number but it says this

Warning: Access denied for user: 'vbbforums@thunder8.cwihosting.com' (Using password: YES) in /home/animega/public_html/newsconfig.php on line 25

Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Access denied for user: 'vbbforums@thunder8.cwihosting.com' (Using password: YES) in /home/animega/public_html/newsconfig.php on line 25
Couldnt find MYSQL!

As a matter of fact I didn't code the hack considering it will run remotely so don't know how it will behave in your situation. I dont think it will be a problem but I can not guarentee that either..

However your problems seems different now. Your error message indicates either one :
* username, password or IP address you entered is wrong
* Your MYSQL server you're trying to connect does not accept remote connections.

Latter is likely: Many hosting companies do not allow remote connections to their MYSQL servers so I suggest contacting them and make sure they have configured their servers to accept remote connections.. If they do they can discuss this problem with them too. Maybe they require a different username/password to connect remotely.

Upto this point your problem is not related to the hack itself. But even if you solve this problem, hack can create other problems about remote connection, I'm not sure about it.. Just give it a try anyway..

[Tobad]

Is there anything that needs to be modified in your script in order for it to work on the new PHP version?

The script has been running flawlesly till today. My host (Powweb) updated the servers to PHP 4.3.0 and when you try to access my main page (where your script loads) it just sits there and never loads in.

When I remove the <?php echo news() ?> page loads fine, but of course the news doesn't show. This really sucks and worst case scenario I have to scramble to find something to work in the meantime.

Any help would be great. Site is http://www.chicagogamers.com. for now I removed the script but you can see it not working here: http://www.chicagogamers.com/index2.php

[Logician]

Originally posted by Tobad
Is there anything that needs to be modified in your script in order for it to work on the new PHP version?

Any help would be great. Site is http://www.chicagogamers.com. for now I removed the script but you can see it not working here: http://www.chicagogamers.com/index2.php

index2.php gives a 404 and as far as I can see the script runs fine in your main page. I guess you figured out a solution?