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.

[davidw]

As long as the page has a specific output (regardless of the output being static or dynamic); e.g. RSS/SQL query - I don't see why not. Each of these relies on specific outputs from their respective sources (Blog/RSS/Forum output). If the output is dynamic the ticker will display dynamic results, provided it works.

[Alfa1]

So generating a html page with the latest threads and then using this source for a typed ticker, would be a way to circumvent the problem you encountered.
I have no way to do this myself. If you could, then this would solve the problem.

[davidw]

The typing ticker requires input to be put in manually between two ' or " characters (I'm not sure which offhand) - using a variable there doesn't work. It requests static input and anything else won't display.

What I am understanding of pulling information from another page (html or php) which is dynamic (or static) in nature still has to be put to an output source (storage) before it can be
called, whether in the database or XML. If therefore, the XML is properly formatted as an RSS feed (regardless if it is dynamic to start with) or it is stored in the database, it can be called and used conventionally by pulling of an RSS feed or by a MySQL query.

The typerwriter ticker does not look for RSS feeds nor MySQL queries but statically [manually] inserted text (e.g. hardcoded) and displayed what it reads between those characters.

If someone can make the javascript read from a variable rather than hardcoded text, this will work.

[apiasto]

awesome work thnx

[enteha]

hi,
can I make changes to show poster and post forum next to news? how?

[davidw]

You would need to do two things
1) alter the query to retrieve the poster's information and edit the loop to add that information.
2) add the new variable (the one added in the loop) to the template so that it displays.
Adding the forum works similarly.

I don't have the query offhand but if you look at your table through mysql (via phpmyadmin) you should be able to see what you need.

If you can't figure it out, give me a few days (or as soon as I get time) and I will add it. Usually I do most of my updates on the weekends.

[enteha]

Originally Posted by davidw

You would need to do two things
1) alter the query to retrieve the poster's information and edit the loop to add that information.
2) add the new variable (the one added in the loop) to the template so that it displays.
Adding the forum works similarly.

I don't have the query offhand but if you look at your table through mysql (via phpmyadmin) you should be able to see what you need.

If you can't figure it out, give me a few days (or as soon as I get time) and I will add it. Usually I do most of my updates on the weekends.

thanx davidw, I didn't understand abou mysql and if you do this i'll be very happy.

[davidw]

Most likely it will be this weekend as currently I am working on a new vB Sponsors modification (different than the one on here) and is to be released this week.

[tnagaming]

Hi I'm a noob when it comes to all of this website stuff. We have had this mod installed for a while and no problems now today whenever we try to go to our site we get this error.

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /home/bran7311/public_html/tnagaming/forum/rss/rss_parse.inc on line 343

I've looked through that file and I don't see anything wrong off hand. What is this error and how can I make it go away.

I've done a bunch of google searching but all of that stuff that it gives me doesn't make sense to me. Maybe someone can explain better and help me get rid of this error so I can get my site working again.

I can't remove the mod from my site in order to get my site working as I cannot get into the admin panel for vbulletin as that error pops up when I try to login.

Thanks for any help.

[davidw]

Try removing (temporarily) one of your links in your RSS locations to see what that does as it may be a malformed RSS feed.