Any-forum News hack

We've all seen plenty of news hacks here before. I'm talking about a hack that gets all new threads in a specific forum and shows the first post from the new threads on a separate, non-vB page. These hacks usually show a specific number of threads that you specify, or all threads from the past number of days that you specify. The forum that these threads come from is setup by you, by putting the forumid numbers in a variable in the hack's code file.

I feel that this is a limited system. You are limited to posting news items only in the one or few threads that you specify up front are to be used to get news items from, and then those forums are limited to only posting news items in (because every new thread in it becomes a news item). This just didn't seem like the best solution to me, because if I wanted to cover a particular topic, for example, computer hardware, I would have to have two separate forums: One to post hardware news, and one for non-news items like help and tips.

So what makes my hack different is that you can now post news items in ANY forum. When you post a new thread, there will be a new option in the same area as "parse urls" and "disable smilies"; this new option is called, "make a news item?" If you leave that box unchecked, the thread gets posted as normal. But if you check it, then not only does the thread get posted, but it will also show up on a separate page. So now, you can post news items and non-news items in the same forum, in any forum, and only the threads you want to be news items will show up as news items.

I have set up a permission for this checkbox, so it will only appear for the usergroups you want it to appear for. Setting this permission is just like setting any other usergroup permission, like the ability for the usergroup to post new threads, move threads, download attachments, etc.

You can change the news status of a thread, in other words, change a thread from being a news item to not a news item, or vice-versa, via a new option that appears on the Edit Thread screen from the Admin Tools.

This hack also includes a simple "latest threads" feature, that on the same page as the news items will show the most recently-replied to threads (the most recently active threads). I did these two things together because I knew they would be very similar to code, and would appear on the same page. However, each part is completely separate from the other part, and it is very easy to only use one part of the hack or the other.

Here is an image of the checkbox:


Here is the new permission setup (by default, for any new usergroups you create, this permission will be set to 'NO'):


There is a working demo of this hack. The test forums is located here, and the news page is located here. You can use the test forums as an unregistered user; I have set up the unregistered usergroup to have Super Moderator powers, so you should be able to play around with the Edit Thread admin tool, etc.

I'm posting this in the Beta forums because I'd like for some other people to let me know it works OK for them. It works fine for me, on two boards; I originally wrote it and developed it for my regular board, which was heavily hacked to begin with. I then setup a clean, unhacked, totally stock board as a testing grounds, and recreated the hack, and again, it worked fine. I want to confirm that it works fine for at least one other person, but I'm also hoping that someone more experienced than myself can take a look at it to see if I've coded it the best way possible.

The other issue I hope to address here in Beta relates to how the text from news item threads is formatted to appear on the news page. Currently, this hack gets the entire contents of the first post of a thread, and it is run through the bbcode parser, so what you see on the news page is just like what you see in the thread itself, including smilies, all vB Code tags converted, etc. Also, the entire post is used; it is not run through any process that limits it to a certain number of characters. The reason I did not set up a character limit was mainly so that the bbcode parser would not get confused if a closing tag was completely or partially cut out. I figured that since I included a permission system, that at least for me would limit the ability to make a thread a news item to Admins and Mods, I could teach my staff to keep news item threads short.

However, I have toyed with the idea (in my mind) of changing the hack so that if you check a box to make a thread a news item, when you submit the thread, instead of the thread being posted straight away, instead, first you are taken to another page with a textarea containing the contents of the post. In this second textarea, which contains what you just typed in the normal newthread screen, you can edit or change what you typed, and what you do here would get stored in an additional field added to the thread table, and this is what would get shown on the news page. That way, you could start a thread, put an entire news article in it or whatever, mark it to be a news item, submit it, then pare down the contents of the post to just a little blurb suitable for a news item display on the news page, while the original bit you typed gets saved as a post and shown in the thread as normal. (Hope that makes sense.) If I hear enough of a demand for something like this, or get any other ideas, I may consider it. The downside to this is it becomes a little more complicated to post a news item thread.

OK, so install it or play with the demo, and let me know if it's ready for a full release!

Edit on Jan. 1, 2002: This hack has been updated to Version 2, with new features as discussed throughout this thread. Please go to this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...281#post210281

[sianews]

Steve, that's the exact same thing I would like. The news just goes into a queue and you can checkk "yes" or "no". Is that a possibility JJR512?

[SirSteve]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by sianews
Steve, that's the exact same thing I would like. The news just goes into a queue and you can checkk "yes" or "no". Is that a possibility JJR512?

[JJR512]

sianews, about the URL thing, that should be pretty easy to add, I'll be able to get that done soon. This hadn't occured to me because I include a link to the source article in the message body itself anyway.

Now about the moderation queue for news items... that sounds like a good idea. I'll have to see if I can figure something out. Now do you want the thread itself to still get posted and be visible, while it waits to show up on the news page? Or do you want the thread to not show up at all while it's waiting for approval?

[SirSteve]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by JJR512
Now about the moderation queue for news items... that sounds like a good idea. I'll have to see if I can figure something out. Now do you want the thread itself to still get posted and be visible, while it waits to show up on the news page?

[sianews]

Sounds great - looking forward to it.

I always put a link in my article too, but this way would eliminate a step. Alternativly, you could make the headline print our like:

"This is the headline" - Read Post

With the headline linking to the source and the read post linking to the post. Also, instead of a checkbox, how about of the URL field has something in it, that acts as the "yes" in order for it to be posted on the front page. But that might limit the usefulness to people doing other things. Maybe an option or something.

[bigmattyh]

Hey, I've noticed that the news index file only seems to work on my system when I place it in the forums directory. Is there any way to fix this so that it works in any directory? Or did I mess something up?

[bigmattyh]

FYI, if you want to use HTML in your news instead of vbcode, you can go into the homeindex.php file and replace[QUOTE]$gnpagetext=bbcodeparse($gnpagetext);

[bigmattyh]

Hey JJR, I hope you don't mind, but since you created a hack that I really happened to need -- at the moment I needed it -- I made a couple of customizations that really suited my purposes.

This is one I think a lot of people might be interested in.

I've always liked being able to cut short a news article on the main page, say, to a paragraph or two. Then you can click on a "READ MORE" link or something to that effect, so you don't end up taking up so much space on your home page.

So, I've modified the aforeposted hack to add this functionality.

This extra little bit of code will read the post, separate out the paragraphs, and if the post runs longer than your preset maximum number of paragraphs, it adds a "MORE >>" link at the end of the text.

Around line 20-ish, you'll see a line like this:

PHP Code:

$gnpagetext=bbcodeparse($gnpagetext); 


After this line, insert the following code:

PHP Code:

$maxpars = 2;  // The maximum number of paragraphs you want to show
$gnpagetext=ereg_replace("(<br />|\n|\r)+", "\n", $gnpagetext);
$gnpagetext=ereg_replace("(\n)+", "\n", $gnpagetext);
$gnparagraphs=explode("\n", $gnpagetext);
for ($par = 0; (($par < $maxpars) and ($gnparagraphs[$par] <> "")); $par++) {
  $parcache[$par]=$gnparagraphs[$par];
}
$gnpagetext = implode("\n <br /><br /> \n", $parcache);
if ($gnparagraphs[$maxpars]) {
  $gnmorelink="<a href=\"showthread.php?s=$session[sessionhash]&threadid=$gnthreadid\">MORE »</a>";  
}
unset($parcache); 


$maxpars (in case you couldn't guess) is the maximum number of paragraphs you want to show. If you set it to 1, you'll only see one paragraph of the news, etc. etc. etc.

And you'll have to add $gnmorelink after $gnpagetext in the templates.

Please test it out! Enjoy!

[Goldfinger]

Looks GREAT .. one feature i'd like to see is maybe being able to include the person's avatar if they have one.

[The Realist]

Installed this beta hack for a test and Im not able to keep the Can make new threads a News item ticked on the option I need.

Its ticked on (NO) as default, but when I go to change the option to (YES) it does not save it, so therefore the option does not appear in the bottom table of the post.

Also, were does the homeindex.php file go, is it into root of the forum or admin?.............. does not say? and were is the newspages called from/viewed by the members or must a link be placed in a template?

Thanks,