[ Release v2.0.1 ] External discussion links (join/start a conversation!)

Another quick, but kick-arse hack. We have a home-made content management system (actually, a beta tool see incursio.com for more info - product is called Editio). At any rate, it allows staff or community members to create online articles. Once articles are published, I wanted a way to automatically link them into our forums, so people could start a discussion, or join a discussion already in progress about that particular article. Yahoo! does this with news events as well.

At any rate, perl script. chmod 755, I call it discuss_link.cgi. It should be invoked via SSI. Under Apache:

  <!--#include virtual=/cgi-bin/discuss_link.cgi?topic=Downhill+Skiing+Basics&forum=5 -->

In the link above, plug in your forum number (forumid column in VB), and the title of the article. The title will be used as the title of the post. If a post exists in the passed forum with that title, a link to "Join the conversation" will be emitted. Otherwise, you get a link called "Start a conversation". You get the picture.

Our content management system (through its plugin concept) allows us to have stuff like this embedded within each article - you could cobble up something similar in your own system with a little effort.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

use DBI;

#Require the cgi library
require '/opt/web/cgi-bin/cgi-lib.pl';

&ReadParse(*input);

# Grab fields
$topic =  $input{'topic'};
$forum =  $input{'forum'};

# Does the forum/topic combo exist?

# Connect to mySQL

$dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:vbulletin", "id", "password");

if ( !defined $dbh ) {
  print "<LI>Cannot connect to mySQL server: $DBI::errstr\n";
}

# Grab the forum name

$q = "SELECT title FROM forum WHERE forum = $forum";

$sth = $dbh->prepare($q);
$sth->execute;
@result = $sth->fetchrow_array;
$forum_name = $result[0];
$sth->finish;

$quoted_title = $dbh->quote($topic);
$q = "SELECT threadid FROM thread WHERE forumid = $forum AND title = $quoted_title";
$sth = $dbh->prepare($q);
$sth->execute;
@result = $sth->fetchrow_array;
$threadid = $result[0];
$sth->finish;

# Prep for linking
$topic =~ tr/ /+/;

if( $threadid <= 0 ) {
  print "<A HREF=http://www.mysite.com/forums/newthread.php?s=&action=newthread&forumid=$forum&subject=$topic>Start a Conversation!</A>";
  exit(1);
}

print ("<A HREF=http://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=$threadid>Join the Conversation!</A>");

exit;

Cheers.

[jarvis]

Ok, being a PHP-idiot, where exactly would the urlencode() go?

thanks...

[tamarian]

Jarvis,

Find:

   if ($threadid <= 0) {

And add this before it:

$topic = urlencode($topic);