Dynamic Announcements: Programmable Forum Home Announcement/Message with conditionals

This hack allows you to post powerful dynamic announcements (changing according to different conditions) on forum home page. It differs from vbulletin's default announcements in 2 ways:

• The announcement is displayed in forum home page, not inside thread view. So visitors will read them on home page without clicking any links.
• The Hack's announcements are not static: ie. they can be powerfully programmed to display themselves according to many conditions.

This hack is the VB3 version of my Dynamic Forum Home Announcement Hack and it is a bit more improved in that it is now able to display your announcement as it was before AND also in DHTML popup box as well which ever you prefer better or even both. (DHTML poupup announcement is not technically a popup so popup killers can not kill it either.)

Basic Usage : You can set a text in your Admin CP and it's displayed in forum home to all users.

Advanced Usage : With conditionals you can set different texts/notifications/messages/announcements and they will be displayed if your pre-configured condition applies. This allows you to create powerful announcements/private messages/texts which address their receipt only if a certain condition is met. Some examples:

You can set to show an announcement in forum home IF:

1. user is X
2. user's usergroup is Y
3. his profile field Z is X
4. user has X posts or has more than Y posts but less than Z posts
5. his last visit time was X days ago
6. today is X, hour is between Y and Z, day is wednesday, month is Y, week is month's 2nd week, today is user's birthday
7. User is invisible/visible
8. his timeset is set to A
9. etc.

It's tested in vb versions from v.3.0.0 to 3.0.9 and works fine with all of them. It will work for all future 3.0.x versions too. For vb2 version click here.

Here is a Screenshot from a general table announcement.
Here is a Screenshot from a popup announcement.

Some Features:

• It's Admin CP integrated (Screenshot)
• Smiley, BBCode, HTML, IMG tags are supported in announcements.
• You can address your users with their usernames inside announcements (Use $bbuserinfo[username] variable)
• Announcements are displayed directly in Forum Home so users are forced to read them.
• The Conditionals help you to design powerful and ever changing announcements/private messages/forum home notifications.
• Poupup announcement can not be killed by popup killer software

If you install the hack, click INSTALL, thank you..

Hacks of the hack:
* Hack 1: Puts the announcement into header instead of forum home page so that announcement appears in all forum pages.
* Hack 2: Integrates announcement with vBA_CMPS portal hack.
* Hack 3: Popup announcement will popup once in every XX hours.


Logician \\=^))

[pigsy]

Logician, in the installation instructions you say to modify options.php to turn on debug (you say "Always debug on while adding a setting"), but you don't say to revert back afterwards, is this intended, or an oversight?

[Logician]

Originally Posted by pigsy

Logician, in the installation instructions you say to modify options.php to turn on debug (you say "Always debug on while adding a setting"), but you don't say to revert back afterwards, is this intended, or an oversight?

It is intended. It does not matter whether you revert it or not after hack is installed but I believe that "hacked" version is better while adding a new setting because it allows you to set the settings permenant.

[sketch42]

Originally Posted by Logician

It is intended. It does not matter whether you revert it or not after hack is installed but I believe that "hacked" version is better while adding a new setting because it allows you to set the settings permenant.

for users awaiting email confirmation im tryin to put in the announcement the activation link i tried putting this in the announcement $activatelink but that didnt work.. any ideas??

[Logician]

Originally Posted by sketch42

for users awaiting email confirmation im tryin to put in the announcement the activation link i tried putting this in the announcement $activatelink but that didnt work.. any ideas??

yes I have 2 ideas:
1- you can not do that because "$activatelink" variable is dynamically compiled in email script so it does not have a value assigned in other parts of vbulletin.
2- You should NOT do that either because then everybody can click to it to activate their account. The point of it is to pass it via email so that you can make sure email address is correct. If people can activate their account by clicking a link in the board, it means they can register without using a valid email address so email confirmation become useless anymore.

[sketch42]

Originally Posted by Logician

yes I have 2 ideas:
1- you can not do that because "$activatelink" variable is dynamically compiled in email script so it does not have a value assigned in other parts of vbulletin.
2- You should NOT do that either because then everybody can click to it to activate their account. The point of it is to pass it via email so that you can make sure email address is correct. If people can activate their account by clicking a link in the board, it means they can register without using a valid email address so email confirmation become useless anymore.

yes i understand... the thing is most of my users arent recieving emails.. and ive checked their email addy's and they are in fact real.. so as a temporary measure (untill i figure out whats wrong with the email) i wanted them to be able to activate their accnt

[MrLANlord]

Installed perfectly and I think I've got the conditional syntax down well now. Thanks it works great!

Anyone, a few questions:
1) Not being a big modder, how/what do I edit so that the non-popup will appear at all times (the pop-up in other places would be too annoying)? Of course forumhome is all set, but looking for it to stay on forum display, thread display, searches, etc.
2) I saw that someone got it working on vBadvanced and was wondering if the same person or any of you smart folks could tell me how to get this to work on the newer vBadvanced CMPS?

[Bobbo]

I would certainly love to see this mod enabled for VBA CMPS as well. I've been trying to adapt it, with no success. (probably spent 5 hours on this and only proven how much I have no clue about)

If anyone has had success, please let me know.

Thanks for another great mod Logician.

[kall]

Originally Posted by Bobbo

I would certainly love to see this mod enabled for VBA CMPS as well. I've been trying to adapt it, with no success. (probably spent 5 hours on this and only proven how much I have no clue about)

If anyone has had success, please let me know.

Thanks for another great mod Logician.

I managed to sort that out..

Have a look over on vBa, or drop me a PM.



@Logician: want the code to integrate this into vBaCMPS?

[sv1cec]

Excellent hack, works fine, thank you.

One question though: I would like to have pre-made conditionals in the announcements, which are not active. In other words, something like HTML code enclosed between <!-- and -->. When I want to put a new announcement, I go in, remove the comments tags and write the new announcement. In that way, I do not have to remember what conditionals to use for each category (for example, I have a pre-made announcement for my moderators, but it does not show anything until the comment tags are removed), I have entered them once and then use them accordingly.

I tried this and it didn't work, the announcement is still shown. Any ideas??

Many thanks.
-----
John

[Logician]

Originally Posted by sv1cec

One question though: I would like to have pre-made conditionals in the announcements, which are not active. In other words, something like HTML code enclosed between <!-- and -->. When I want to put a new announcement, I go in, remove the comments tags and write the new announcement. In that way, I do not have to remember what conditionals to use for each category (for example, I have a pre-made announcement for my moderators, but it does not show anything until the comment tags are removed), I have entered them once and then use them accordingly.

If I understand your request correctly, the solution is to add a new "impossible" conditional to your conditional sytnax which would naturally make it disappear. For instance your moderator announcement should be like this:
[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==5)]]
my announcement
[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==5)]]

If you make it like this:
[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==5 AND $dontshow==1)]]
my announcement
[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==5 AND $dontshow==1)]]

This announcement will not be displayed to your moderators until you remove the "AND $dontshow==1" part. Because this variable check becomes the part of your conditional and it is never TRUE so conditional is always ignored.

@Logician: want the code to integrate this into vBaCMPS?

@kall: Please feel free to release your code here. I don't use that script, nor I created their integration script so it is better if you release it yourself as you should take the credit for it. If you post it into this thread, I'll link it in the first post of the hack. thx!