vB News Ticker

What does this do? It allows you to take your news from your news forums (up to 9 news forums) and display them. You have a choice on how many you can pull from each forum, how fast you want the ticker to scroll, the length of the title of each news item, etc.

This works on 3.5.4, 3.5.5, and should work on pretty much any of the 3.5.x. I've not tested this for 3.6, but I have been told that it does work for 3.6.

Install/Upgrade Instructions

Step 1: 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
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

Step 2: Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-christianb_vbnews_ticker.xml
Remove contents of second line ./includes/xml/product.xml
Click the button next to Yes in Allow Overwrite
Click Import

Step 3: Go to your admin Control Panel => vBulletin Options => vBulletin Options => vB News Ticker => [Edit Settings]
Alter Settings as appropriate
*** 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.
Click Save

I've included the readme and the .xml Product/Plugin in the zip file.

If there are features you'd like to see for a future release, please let me know.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Changes

1.0.4 Added security

1.0.3 Changed the hook location from forumhome_complete to global_start giving admin ability to put the news ticker most places rather than in forum home.
Updated the query to remove a JOIN that may have been causing delays.

1.0.2 Added instructions to comment out unneccessary query pulls in the array to reduce wait times.
Optimized the query by removing non-essential SELECTs.
Added option for user to separate news items in admincp.
Fixed IE whitespace issue for ticker height as seen here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....3&postcount=28

1.0.1 Fixed a width issue as seen here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....3&postcount=12


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.

Temporary demo location:
http://www.christianboards.org/forum.php

[rmxs]

LOL you are very fast i know this thing with edit byt others user maube not
i have already change the    

now about the color i mean the letter...no boarder on option in admin control panel that user can set 2 different collors EXAPLE 1-3-5-7 topics BLUE 2-4-6-8 topics RED

[davidw]

Honestly, I am not sure if the even/odd color is probable. The information is gathered in a single query and then run through a while loop. The while loop is then run each time for each instance of what is pulled out of the query. This is done sequencially.

If it is possible, I would like to know (and how) (and I could then make changes to do so).

[davidw]

I'm working on an update right now that will give users the option to choose a border, a border size, a border color, a background color, in addition to the change made earlier (admincp control on spacing). It won't be ready until tomorrow though as I've written it but haven't had time to test it.

[Harley-Heaven]

Hi Chris,

had a look at the mod/hack, looks great. Can you give a newbie a little piece of advice please??

Where do I find the forum numbers from if I am using a Hack/Mod called "About Today" where I can select a number of news sources i.e. CNN, BBC, Yahoo etc.

Thanks for your assistance.

[davidw]

I'm not familiar with that hack. However, if that information is going into a forum, then you have no problems. Here is a snippit of something I posted yesterday but it should help you out, especially if About Today does insert into a forum.

Originally Posted by christianb

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).

[davidw]

@rmxs - now that I think about it - I think it CAN be done - I just have to figure out how.

[Eagle Creek]

My homepage is slow after installing this?

Could that be caused by the ticker? (I have set 7 items) or just something else?

EDIT:
In FireFox it looks great. But when using IE I puts extra whitelines between it.

Look:
http://www.nucia.nl/forum/

[davidw]

TBH, I'm not sure why it is slow (in testing most of the time 7-8 out of 10 times it worked fine) but I think it could have something to do with the subquery. However, I don't know for sure. However, I am caching templates, so that should speed things up on the ticker.

EDIT: in the control panel, go to vbulletin options => vB News Ticker => Ticker Height => change the number from 50 to 10. That should fix it.

[Eagle Creek]

Homepage takes 8(!) seconds to load .
Both IE and FireFox.

When I disable the ticker it's running fine. I really like the feature but when it's slowing down my HP so much I can't have it installed.

(the height is ok now in IE)

I'm running:
PHP 4.4.2
MySQL Version 4.1.19-standard-log

[davidw]

It's probably the subquery then. I'll see what I can do to try to speed this up.

I've updated the zip file to include the latest changes.