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 \\=^))

[Zelda-King]

Originally Posted by Zelda-King

Are there any steps that need redoing following an upgrade OTHER than file edits? I had this running on 3.0.1 then I upgraded to 3.0.3, applied the edits and the announcements don't show. I haven't at this point reverted any templates and I still see the admincp options.

I fixed this. For some reason when I upgraded from 3.0.1 to 3.0.3, the Dynamic Announcement edit was missing from the FORUMHOME template even though the template wasn't reverted. It is working on 3.0.3 fine.

[KW802]

Originally Posted by sv1cec

Try using the HTML marquee tag.

Rgds

Does Mozilla, etc. support the marquee tag? I had thought that was an IE thing.

[Zelda-King]

Firefox does. I've been informed Netscape doesn't.

[ranger2kxlt]

sv1cec, works perfect...thanks for the find!

Also what happens if you use the marquee and browser doesn't support it? Will the text still show, just in one spot or will it not show at all?

[Zelda-King]

You'd see the text, with no non-functional coding. Actually I just noticed Firefox also supports blinking. I didn't know that. :/

[sv1cec]

Originally Posted by KW802

Does Mozilla, etc. support the marquee tag? I had thought that was an IE thing.

Yes it does!!

[sv1cec]

Originally Posted by ranger2kxlt

sv1cec, works perfect...thanks for the find!

Also what happens if you use the marquee and browser doesn't support it? Will the text still show, just in one spot or will it not show at all?

Glad if I could be of help.

I am not sure about the marquee tag, Netscape and IE I use for testing, both support it, so I am not very interesting in finding out about this.

Rgds

[ranger2kxlt]

off topic, Whats it like over there right now? with the olympics? traffic all over?

btw...thanks again :-D

[KW802]

I feel old... I just did some quick searches and the "marquee" tag goes back the days of IE version 2.

[sv1cec]

Originally Posted by ranger2kxlt

off topic, Whats it like over there right now? with the olympics? traffic all over?


btw...thanks again :-D

Actually, it is better than before, believe it or not. The thing is most Greeks are on vacation during August, and the rest of the people have taken the organizer's suggestion and use public transportation (which with the new tramway and the new metro stations is much better now than before).

Sorry for the off topic answer.

Contact me directly if you need more info.

Rgds