Automatic Birthday Thread

This hack is inspired by the Birthday Hack for vB2 by Logician. It will automatically create a Happy Birthday thread in a specified forum, listing the people with birthdays for that day. Then other members can post their happy birthday wishes in the thread.

I had the original hack installed on my VB2 board and when I upgraded to VB3 my members missed it. Luckily, it's really easy to implement.

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Files to modify: /includes/cron/birthday.php
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Instructions are in the attached text file. The mod should take about 5 minutes.

Be sure to change the variables that say // CHANGE ME

You can customize the message in the $birthday_greeting_thread variable. You could also ad IMG tags with an image of some kind, like in my screenshot.

Note that you MUST turn on BB CODE in you birthday forum in order for this to work properly.
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Enjoy (and thanks for the inspiration, Logician!)
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New in Version 2.0:

Bug fixes:
> More accurate age calculation. Sometimes it was a year off.
> The correct thread shows up in the last thread post on the forum home page.
> HTML is not required to be turned on in the birthday forum.
> Most of the code is completely rewritten to vB3 standards.

New features:
> Improved look
> Birthday line now says: (User) was born on (date), (AGE: xx)
> If the year is not given, it says "Not telling! " for age.
> The admin is emailed a list of the birthdays with links to their profiles and a link to the happy birthday thread.
> If you use the uShop/uCash hack, you can give birthday points to the users

Upgrading:

Since the code has changed so drastically, I suggest starting with a fresh copy of birthday.php and following the instructions for a new install.

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by ChurchMedia

Well, I've looked some code in newthread.php and I think I could re-write this hack to work correctly and streamline it a bit. I won't have time for a while, though (I've having surgery on Tuesday and will be out for a few weeks). I'll look back into it as soon as I can.

Thanks,

I think they are using verify_id now, like the following:

PHP Code:

$forumid = verify_id('forum', $_REQUEST['forumid']); 


[Bison]

Can someone please make it so we don't have to turn on HTML in our forums?

[ambrosious]

Installed yesterday, this morning I got this,

PHP Code:

Dear Adult Barnyard,<br><br>Here are today's birthdays!<br><br><a href="member.php?u=954">Callisto</a>, born 08-21-0000 


Any ideas?

[ChurchMedia]

You have to turn on HTML for your birthday forum. That will fix it...

[ambrosious]

I can't find out where that is in CP, can you hint me?

[ambrosious]

I got it and it works beautifully!

[ChurchMedia]

In the forum manager -- then enable/disable features. See the screenshot.

[ambrosious]

Thanks! You rock!

[duncan99]

I use phrase in the birthday.php, when I test it by running cron, it works normally all the phrases show up properly, but when the cron runs in automatic mode, all phrases never show? whats the problem?

[jugo]

Originally Posted by Bison

Can someone please make it so we don't have to turn on HTML in our forums?

OK...

I didn't want to enable HTML on my forums (for obvious reasons) so I used BBCode Instead to create the thread's post text.

***EDIT*** The BR Code works even if you do not have HTML enabled.

And it works just fine. :squareeyed: :nervous:

This is what my code looks like:

PHP Code:

    $bday_people .= "-->[url=member.php?u=".$userinfo['userid']."] ".$username."[/url], Age: ".$age."<br>";