Sidebar problems

[DeadSeraphim]

I'm working on a custom skin for a forum (the code, at least, I'm collaborating with a professional designer friend), and I'm wondering if there's anyway to do something like the following in the sidebar:

I've looked at a few plugins/products that could do it for a more standard theme, with essentially the same HTML as the stock, but the HTML in our theme is drastically different, and the stock-standard hardcoded HTML just doesn't work. I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips and pointers for:

* Displaying announcements outside of forums, like on the image (multiple announcements)
* A featured thread solution that doesn't involve manually editting the theme every time we want to change it
* An RSS solution so we can display the podcasts (podcast history link isn't as important). I've an idea this can be done within vBulletin, without ++++ing around with plugins, but I've started using the software literally this week, so I'm still on training wheels, so to speak.

Thanks for any help you may provide. =)

[Dismounted]

The External Data Provider built into vBulletin should also handle podcasts.

[DeadSeraphim]

Originally Posted by Dismounted

The External Data Provider built into vBulletin should also handle podcasts.

It's not really what I'm looking for. the podcasts are from external sites, not our own.

Edit: Bugger it, I'll just make an include plugin that uses magpieRSS and it's own simple backend. It's never failed for me before, I don't see it starting now. I'd still like some help on the first two panels I'm working on though, since I don't want to resort to custom include solutions for every panel there.

Edit 2 (next morning): The RSS is fo real fixed (magpie RSS i love you) but I'm still having a hard time finding solutions for the first two panels. Any ideas?

[Dismounted]

The External Data Provider would allow you to show posts from outside your forum.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...r_implementing

[DeadSeraphim]

yeah, see, that's not about to work. a) it's designed for providing rss feeds from your forum, b) that javascript that I did consider using only works with vbulletin javascript feeds, and is designed for use on other sites. The podcasts links are offsite resources, unless I'm reading this wrong I'm not seeing how this works. In any case, I got it working regardless, with a different system. I still need help with announcements and featured threads though (I'm playing with the Featured Threads plugin now, but I'm gonna have to change some code for it to work), if anyone has any ideas they could lend (seriously, anyone at all).

[Dismounted]

See the other thread.

[DeadSeraphim]

I delved into the wonderful (scoff) world of plugins and made a plugin to show the announcements, though it was frustrating that I couldn't link to announcements individually, or to a page that just showed all announcements regardless of forum. As it's pretty much for just this forum though (unless someone wants me to publish it) it's workable. It's not like we use single forum announcements anyway.

Still working on Featured Threads, but that'll be slow going till I can wrap my head around the Product XML (ie, when I'm not half asleep). Thanks for your help with everything, Dismounted.

[Dismounted]

Enable Debug Mode, it will allow you to see things you wouldn't have seen before. vBulletin generates the XML for you anyway...