vB News Ticker

What does this do? It allows you to take your news from your news forums (up to 9 news forums) and display them. You have a choice on how many you can pull from each forum, how fast you want the ticker to scroll, the length of the title of each news item, etc.

This works on 3.5.4, 3.5.5, and should work on pretty much any of the 3.5.x. I've not tested this for 3.6, but I have been told that it does work for 3.6.

Install/Upgrade Instructions

Step 1: 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
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

Step 2: Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-christianb_vbnews_ticker.xml
Remove contents of second line ./includes/xml/product.xml
Click the button next to Yes in Allow Overwrite
Click Import

Step 3: Go to your admin Control Panel => vBulletin Options => vBulletin Options => vB News Ticker => [Edit Settings]
Alter Settings as appropriate
*** 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.
Click Save

I've included the readme and the .xml Product/Plugin in the zip file.

If there are features you'd like to see for a future release, please let me know.

Frequently Asked Questions

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 add the news ticker to the IBProArcade or Photoplog?
Thanks to Mark.B for his add - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=144

Changes

1.0.4 Added security

1.0.3 Changed the hook location from forumhome_complete to global_start giving admin ability to put the news ticker most places rather than in forum home.
Updated the query to remove a JOIN that may have been causing delays.

1.0.2 Added instructions to comment out unneccessary query pulls in the array to reduce wait times.
Optimized the query by removing non-essential SELECTs.
Added option for user to separate news items in admincp.
Fixed IE whitespace issue for ticker height as seen here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....3&postcount=28

1.0.1 Fixed a width issue as seen here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....3&postcount=12


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.

Temporary demo location:
http://www.christianboards.org/forum.php

[Eagle Creek]

I have the idea my whole forum is slowing down? Also posting a reply takes ages now.

I will de?nstall and re?nstall .

[Eagle Creek]

Noo .

Take a look: http://www.nucia.nl/forum/ . Takes a long time to load.

[davidw]

The only page that should be affected is the forumhome. I see 6 seconds on regular pages and 8 seconds on the forumhome. Try disabling the plugin. I want to see what I reach your page with it disabled.

[Eagle Creek]

It's now disabled, please try again.


Enabled:
Page generated in 5.46892 seconds with 22 queries [Server Loads: 0.44 0.35 : 0.35]

Disabled:
Page generated in 0.14331 seconds with 22 queries [Server Loads: 0.42 0.36 : 0.35]

[davidw]

I see 5 seconds on the forumhome now and 1 1/2 seconds on regular pages.

[Eagle Creek]

You see the difference?

My forumhome is quicker (about <1 second) but there is a difference.

[davidw]

I'll see what I can do about making this quicker. Quicker is better.

[Eagle Creek]

Thankyou .

I'll keep track on this thread.

[davidw]

I got mine up to 1.699seconds (in firefox) - try this - I removed a bunch of stuff that needn't be used (things I had from a query that I'm using for a hack I'm going to release later this week).

Try this one out - if this works, I'll update the hack today - which it possibly could. I disabled my vbshout and installed this and shaved 70% off my delay.

[Buraq]

Yeah I'm experiencing slower loading times as well. Normally my forum home takes fractions of a second to load, with this hack it sometimes takes upwards of 10 (sometimes 12) seconds.

I'll hold off on trying the new xml file till you release the final version, since I made some modifications to the way it displays and don't wanna have to do them again and again.