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

[Eagle Creek]

That's cool .
All of my news items are underlined. At your screenshot they aren't.

What's 'wrong'?

[davidw]

That happened to me one time because I was playing around with my FORUMHOME template and accidentally removed $spacer_open (right above where the $vbnews_ticker goes). Check there to see if it is located there. If not, you may want to put it in there.

[Eagle Creek]

Ahh.. My members don't like it.. .

But I have more forums. I will support this hack till the end! .

[Buraq]

Version 1.0.2 makes my forumhome load even slower (yes I did the edits to the php).

I'm not sure how feasible this is, but why not just include the latest thread titles via RSS instead of queries into the db. I know we implemented something like this on our main website, where we get the latest threads from a specific forum in vBulletin. I have to ask my co-admin how he did it.

Until then, I'm gonna have to disable this plugin. 14+ seconds is just too much, and sometimes the page doesn't load at all until you refresh again.

[davidw]

How many forums were you pulling these from? Also what other plugins were you running with this (in forumhome_complete)? I found this mod doesn't play well with vbshout, for example.

[Buraq]

Originally Posted by christianb

How many forums were you pulling these from? Also what other plugins were you running with this (in forumhome_complete)? I found this mod doesn't play well with vbshout, for example.

I'm pulling threads from 2 forums, and the only other plugin I'm using is a banner rotator plugin I wrote. The banner plugin does not perform any complicated db queries or anything of the sort. It mainly just pulls a couple of variables stored in $vbulletin->options[] via an adminCP back end.

[davidw]

It should be ok then - I don't know why the delay. I'd be interested in the RSS transfer as that might speed things up - but I'm not sure how to do that. Of course, I've always had trouble with using marquees. I will be looking into speeding up the query though.

[Eagle Creek]

You fixed it? (cause I don't see your reply anymore)

[davidw]

I thought I did. lol
I fixed one thing, but removing that line cause it to pull more forums that were not chosen lol. The only reason why it was in there was for a preview - but for some reason it broke something else.

[davidw]

Ok, silly me, accidentally removed the WHERE statement because I thoughtlessly left it on the same line as the one I needed removed.

anyways, here's the potential fix (again)...

@Buraq (and anyone else who may be having a slow response time) - try editing the plugin and changing the query...

Find this:

PHP Code:

            $gettickers = $db->query_read("
                SELECT t.threadid, t.title, t.forumid, t.open, t.dateline, t.visible, t.firstpostid 
                FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "forum f 
                INNER JOIN " . TABLE_PREFIX . "thread t ON t.forumid = f.forumid AND t.visible = 1 AND " . $desclim . " > ( SELECT count(" . $desclim . ") FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "thread WHERE forumid = f.forumid AND visible = 1 AND dateline > t.dateline )
                LEFT OUTER JOIN " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post AS post ON post.postid = t.firstpostid WHERE t.forumid IN (" . implode(',', $tickarray) . ") 
                ORDER BY field(f.forumid," . implode(',', $tickarray) . "), t.dateline desc
            "); 


remove this code:

PHP Code:

LEFT OUTER JOIN " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post AS post ON post.postid = t.firstpostid 


which changes it to this:

PHP Code:

            $gettickers = $db->query_read("
                SELECT t.threadid, t.title, t.forumid, t.open, t.dateline, t.visible, t.firstpostid 
                FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "forum f 
                INNER JOIN " . TABLE_PREFIX . "thread t ON t.forumid = f.forumid AND t.visible = 1 AND " . $desclim . " > ( SELECT count(" . $desclim . ") FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "thread WHERE forumid = f.forumid AND visible = 1 AND dateline > t.dateline )
                WHERE t.forumid IN (" . implode(',', $tickarray) . ")
                ORDER BY field(f.forumid," . implode(',', $tickarray) . "), t.dateline desc
            "); 


That code served no purpose and may actually be causing the problem. It is only used for allowing a preview of the post/thread and it is something I forgot to take out.
This will be fixed in the next version.