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 (or other board pages), not inside thread view. So visitors will read them without clicking on them.
• The Hack's announcements are not static: ie. they can be powerfully programmed to change themselves according to many conditions.

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:

2. user is X
3. user's usergroup is Y
4. his profile field Z is X
5. user has X posts or has more than Y posts but less than Z posts
6. his last visit time was X days ago
7. 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
8. User is invisible/visible
9. user is using style A
10. his cookies are on
11. his timeset is set to A
12. etc..

The conditionals even allows you to design "Board Tips" ever changing according to user's seniority or post number. See how-to document for conditional usage and more info..

It's tested in both v.2.2.6 and v.2.2.7 but it should work with any versions > 2.0.3. (v.2.2.8 or later Users READ HERE!) I'm using it in my own board and a friend's board for more than a month and found it quite stable and released it. Although not likely, if you found any bugs, holler and I'll fix it..

Here is a Screenshot from a "general announcement".
Here is a Screenshot of announcement which is addressed to a certain user.

Some Features:

• It's Admin CP integrated (Screenshot)
• Smiley and BBCode in announcements are parsed
• 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.

If you have problems displaying HTML/smilie/bbcode in your announcements, make this tiny change in hack code

If you install the hack, click INSTALL, thank you..

Logician \\=^))

[Floris]

Installed, everything went 100% ok I use it on my site

[TECK]

as usual, great hack logician. congrats on your fine work.
floren.

[LOD-squa]

I installed it good hack.

[Intex]

V. Nice hack m8. Will check this out soon.

[DrkFusion]

Nice work Locien, I just got a chance to get on the net after school started, and I see so many new hacks, great job

[Alien]

Incredible idea, nice work on this indeed!

[Logician]

To all thread repliers:
Thank you all for your kind comments. I hope you find its usage after installation as much easy as you liked the hack. The "conditionals" might be a little bit confusing especially for newbies, I'm aware of that. But it's really them that makes the hack powerful and highly customizable so all I could do was to supply a good how-to document about them.

If you liked this hack you might want a check these hacks which uses the same conditional power:
Advanced Templates: To design dynamic vb templates with conditionals
WebTemplates: To design non-vb pages which compile data from your vb inside Vb Admin CP(and it has conditional support too)

I really love the power of conditionals so wait for some more hacks from me which is centered around this concept..

[Bad Bunny]

Firstly, this sounds very cool and fun to expiriment with making new conditionals.

Question: How many queries does this add?

[Logician]

Originally posted by Bad Bunny
Question: How many queries does this add?

Let me give you a "good answer" for your "good question": Surprisingly none.

It does not increase your query load because it does not make any SQL connection to your server (as you might have noticed from the hack code). I can hear the question: "Then how does it grab the announcements?" The answer is they are loaded together with your vb settings (that is why I integrated the Admin CP mod. to vb settings screen). And since the settings are already pulled from the db, we dont need to make an extra query for announcements..

[Buddha]

this is fan-damn-tastic logician.
i've already got a few of your hacks installed.
thank you very much.