Add-On Releases - vB News Ticker - Your Blogs RSS Feeds and Forums in a Marquee

What does this do?

It allows you to take your news from your forums (up to 10) and display them in a ticker (marquee).
You have a choice on how many you can pull from each forum as a whole or select your whole site,
how fast you want the ticker to scroll, the length of the title of each news item, colors, etc. You can also add RSS feeds and the latest blogs.

New Features:

Usergroup Permissions (per request)

Ticker Background Color: If you leave this blank, it will stay your forum colors. If you put in a hex value, it will change to that color.
Please use 000000 - FFFFFF only.

Ticker Color: If you leave this blank, it will stay your forum colors. If you put in a hex value, it will change to that color.
Please use 000000 - FFFFFF only.

Ticker Prefix: You can prefix anything you want here. Such as Latest Blogs - or Latest News: or whatever you want to start out with.


WARNING *** 2.0 IS NO LONGER BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH 3.6.x ***

Install Instructions

Step 1:
Fresh Install
If you intend to use the RSS features, upload the RSS folder to the root of your forums.
If you rename this folder or change the location, you MUST edit the path in the XML file for each of the require_once 'rss/rss_fetch.inc'; paths.
Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-davidw_vbnews_ticker.xml
Click Import

Upgrade Options:
Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-davidw_vbnews_ticker.xml
[If upgrading] Click the button next to Yes in Allow Overwrite
Click Import
You will probably want to revert any templates you have altered as most changes people have requested are now integrated.


Step 2:
Edit the admincp options
*** IMPORTANT ***
Make sure that if you do not enter an item in the forumIDs after the first one, the rest must be set to 0
- if it is not set to 0 or a forumid number, it will result in a database error.


Step 3:
Go to your admin Control Panel => Styles & Templates => Style Manager
Find your Master/Parent style or the style you wish to add this to and drop down the All Style Options menu dropdown and choose Edit Templates
Click Go if it does not redirect you
For your Forums Directory:

Open up your Forum Home Templates subdirectory and choose your FORUMHOME template

Find:

PHP Code:

<!-- main --> 


Add above:

PHP Code:

$vbnews_ticker 


Click Save & Reload

For all your web pages (Navigation Bar)
Open up your Navigation / Breadcrumb Templates subdirectory and choose Navbar template

Find:

PHP Code:

<!-- / nav buttons bar -->

<br /> 


Add Below (You may want to remove the <br /> for aesthetics):

PHP Code:

$vbnews_ticker 


Click Save & Reload


Frequently Asked Questions

How do I add the news ticker to my vB Advanced?
To get the ticker in your vbadvanced, you need to add global output variables
Admin CP => vBa CMPS => Default Settings => Portal Output Global Variables and put vbnews_ticker in there.

How do I add the news ticker to the IBProArcade or Photoplog?
Thanks to Mark.B for his add - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=144

Why does this seem slow?
For a couple links or for a couple displayed items per link/news item, it should display fine, but as you add more (fill up) each potential slot and up the number of items to pull it will take longer to load. It it easy to add up fast. This uses anywhere from 1-30 queries depending on how many you use.

What is the forumid?
The forumid is the id of the forum you have created. Each forum has its own unique number assigned to it. When you click on a forum link you can see a number that is assigned to it. This will show up in the URL of the page you are browsing. Another way of seeing the forumid is to go to your admin control panel => Forums & Moderators => Forum Manager => Click on [Expand All] and then move your mouse over (hover) any of the forums you've created. Your status bar (bottom of screen) should display your forumid (number at the end of the link/url).

How do I change the color of the text?
It's an admincp option now
If you want alternating colors do this (You need to edit the plugin to make this work.):
Find:

PHP Code:

$ticker_titles             .= '<a href="showthread.php?t='. $ticker['threadid'] .'" title="'. $ticker['title'] .'" target="blank">'. $ticker['title'] .'</a> '. $ticksep.''; 


Replace With:

PHP Code:

$tick_color                = ($color % 2) ? $color1 : $color2;
                $ticker_titles             .= '<a href="showthread.php?t='. $ticker['threadid'] .'" title="'. $ticker['title'] .'" target="blank"><font color="'. $tick_color .'">'. $ticker['title'] .'</font></a> '. $ticksep .'';
                $color++; 


How do I put in (absolute) links directly to the location rather than relative links?
In the plugin, find each instance of
showthread.php?t= (or whatever the page is)

and change part to a full url.
Example:
http://www.yoursite.com/showthread.php?t=


Change Log:

2.0.2
Added usergroup permissions.

2.0.1
Fix for Thread Prefixes. It no longer just uses prefixids - but grabs the vbphrase that is associated with the prefixid. I don't know how I missed this.

2.0

WARNING *** THIS IS NO LONGER BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH 3.6.x ***

*Ability to add a ticker prefix without editing the template now.
*Ability to add a ticker background color without editing the template now.
*Ability to add a ticker color without editing the product/plugin now.
*Separate General/Blogs/Forums/RSS AdminCP Options.

Blogs Options:
*Enable/Disable Blogs.
*Allows either unlimited latest blogs or x amount from up to ten individual users.
*Separate limits for all blogs or individual blogs.

Forum Options:
*Enable/Disable Forums.
*Allows either unlimited latest forums or x amounts from up to ten individual forums.
*Separate limits for all forums or individual forums.
*Grabs prefixes if available.

RSS Options:
*Enable/Disable RSS.
*Allows up to ten RSS feeds.
*Fixed a bug that displayed x-1 on limits for total displayed where x is how many you previously specified.

1.4

This now allows you to add up to 5 blog users' feeds to the ticker. As with 1.3, this also includes the RSS (see 1.3 for details).

1.3
This now allows you to add up to 5 external RSS feeds to the ticker. This uses magpierss-0.72 as found at sourceforge. It may be possible that your site might not work with magpie.

I've updated this a little and it works on 3.7. If you have a previous version, uninstall it first and then install this one. Make sure you copy your admincp settings for this down first.

Known Bugs/Issues:
From my testing on the new updates, when I (or a user on my site) clicks on any of the links that has the news ticker, it works fine, but when I or a user hits the refresh button, it can hang. I'm unsure why this is happening.

[macc]

have just one question...how get this to work on cmps - 3.0 ...have tested - with global portal variables but come not up on cmps page ?


reg

macc

[davidw]

I'll probably look at this tonight or tomorrow night as I've just set up cmps 3.0 with 3.7

[nascarjake]

is it possible to make this not only work on vBulletin but for an external php site as well? I want to use it on my site, and all the links would link over to my forum, my site uses a different php cms called openci

[davidw]

This is installed on vbulletin, but anywhere that has an RSS feed you can use. Are you wanting to know if this will work on a non-vb page? If so, there is a strong possibility but it would take some tweaking to the code.

[Phaedrus]

This works swimmingly in 3.6.8... pulling only from the RSS Feeds.

Thanks!

[nightbloom]

For some reason, this just doesnt show the first item on the RSS feed. Its weird. I have it set to show four items from this feed and instead it only shows 3. The first one just isnt there.

I am unable to figure out why. lol This is my own news feed off my site's main page. ^^

[davidw]

That's bizarre - is that the only ticker going - that one RSS feed?

[Phaedrus]

How often does it check the rss feed?

[nightbloom]

Originally Posted by davidw

That's bizarre - is that the only ticker going - that one RSS feed?

Yup. Because it is a seperate from the main forum, many ppl link straight to the forum and often miss the news from the main page. I thought this may solve that issue without setting up an RSS feed post, which seems redundant.

[davidw]

Originally Posted by Phaedrus

How often does it check the rss feed?

I think the RSS gets checked by either A) the time in between refreshes or B) the time setting in the RSS controls itself. A) won't come into play until after B) reaches its set time (which I'm not sure where the setting is located) but I think it is set for 1 hour (or 60x60 seconds). Finding and changing this to a smaller number will speed up the time that it gets updated and cached.

Originally Posted by nightbloom

Yup. Because it is a seperate from the main forum, many ppl link straight to the forum and often miss the news from the main page. I thought this may solve that issue without setting up an RSS feed post, which seems redundant.

I'm thinking that what you and I were viewing was the cached version of the feed. IF this was a recent post/even/etc. that fell within the cached period, that would explain why it was not included, but would not explain why there was only three if you set it to four. As for the RSS went, it most likely is a cache issue, which this might help fix it:

See if you can find a cache folder within your rss folder. CHMOD'ding the RSS folder 777 should fix this, but here's an secondary method.
In your rss folder (preferably), create a folder and chmod it 777. I will name it example in this example.

Then, open up /rss/rss_fetch.inc
Find (about 2/3rds of the way down):

    if ( !defined('MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR') ) {
        define('MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR', './cache');
    }

Replace:

define('MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR', './cache');

with:

define('MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR', '/var/foo/magpie/cache/dir/for/example');

Save and replace/upload.