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 \\=^))

[illPhever]

logician,

thanks for this hack. i just installed it and it works great. it is very handy! this is the kind of thing that should come standard in vb.

[AaronFry]

awesome! thanks for the great hack!

[EFairy]

Thank you very much, I love it!

[Antivirus]

Logician,
Great hack, this feature should be standard on all vB upgrades, i was using this previously, however now that we're testing 3.5 rc2, i was wondeiring if you were working on a ported version for 3.5, for eventual release?

[acidkid00]

great hack... installed.. thanks

[pgowder]

I'm trying to have a different header/footer for certain templates. Can this hack do this??

[Logician]

Originally Posted by pgowder

I'm trying to have a different header/footer for certain templates. Can this hack do this??

no.. but what you wanted can be achieved this way:

make a copy of these lines in global.php:

PHP Code:

eval('$header = "' . fetch_template('header') . '";');
eval('$footer = "' . fetch_template('footer') . '";'); 


Like

PHP Code:

eval('$header = "' . fetch_template('header') . '";');
eval('$footer = "' . fetch_template('footer') . '";');
eval('$header2 = "' . fetch_template('header2') . '";');
eval('$footer2 = "' . fetch_template('footer2') . '";'); 


find :

PHP Code:

    // the really important ones
    'header',
    'footer', 


and replace it as

PHP Code:

    // the really important ones
    'header',
    'footer',
             'header2',
    'footer2', 


Then user $header2 and $footer2 in anytemplate you like.

[CyberRanger]

Can the conditionals be used to only show the announcement in a certain forum? For example, we have an "Off Topic" area (f=161) where I'd like the announcement to show there but not in other forums. (I have changed the code so that the announcement is part of the header).

Thanks!

[Logician]

Originally Posted by westpointer

Can the conditionals be used to only show the announcement in a certain forum? For example, we have an "Off Topic" area (f=161) where I'd like the announcement to show there but not in other forums. (I have changed the code so that the announcement is part of the header).

Thanks!

not tested personally, but I believe this should work in your case:

[[($forumid==161 OR $f==161)]]
...
[[/($forumid==161 OR $f==161)]]

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by Logician

[[($forumid==161 OR $f==161)]]
...
[[/($forumid==161 OR $f==161)]]

Thanks! I did need to take out the $f==161 then it worked great!