Help a total newbie. Is this custom modification doable?

[Ben E Lou]

Hello everyone. Thanks in advance for indulging a semi-clueless dolt in some questions.

I'm the commish of a sim football league and we use vbulletin for our forums. On each gameday (three days a week), I create four threads that are of identical structure, copying and pasting from several web locations, and that process takes me quite some time (30-45 minutes). I'd love to automate a good bit of it, and I suspect it's doable, but I'm not certain. I've created a bit of a functional specification for what I'm looking for. There are some details left out, I know.


PRE-CONDITIONS
(The commish will have completed the following actions prior to the process running.)

1. Woof_export.zip is uploaded.
2. DBUpdater has been run.
3. FOF's Standard HTML has been generated and uploaded.
4. Extractor and Extender HTML files have been uploaded to same folder as GindinHTML.

TRIGGER(S)
"Post Gameday Items" button is pressed.

POST-CONDITIONS
1. No-spoiler thread is posted.
2. Gameday thread is posted.
3. Players Of The Week thread is posted.
4. Pregame Discussion thread for next week is posted.


DETAILED REQUIREMENTS

TRIGGER REQUIREMENTS

• Add a button titled "Post Gameday Items" to our vbulletin skin that can only be seen by members of a new user group called "commish."
• When button is pressed by commish user, the process begins.

NO-SPOILER THREAD

• Posted in General Discussion Forum (Forum ID=8).
• Title is "YYYY Week WW No-Spoiler Thread," where YYYY=current game year and WW=current game week.
• Line one contains link to woof_export.zip for current week.
• Lines 2 and 3 are blank.
• Beginning at line four, contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof_test/P...NoSpoiler.aspx populate the remainder of post.

GAMEDAY THREAD

• Posted in Web Site Talk And Testing Forum (Forum ID=23.)
• Title is "YYYY Week WW Completed."
• Lines one through six are blank. (Commish will manually insert headlines.)
• Line seven contains link to woof_export.zip for current week.
• Lines eight and nine are blank.
• Beginning at line ten, insert contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof_test/P...thSpoiler.aspx
• After manually inserting headlines, commish will manually move thread to Announcements forum.

PLAYERS OF THE WEEK THREAD

• Posted in Web Site Talk And Testing Forum (Forum ID=23.)
• Title is "YYYY Week WW Players Of The Week"
• First post contains blank version of template created by SkyDog for POW. (Should this be pulled from a static forum post? A web page?)
• 2nd post contains contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof/HTML/SeasonAwards.html
• 3rd post contains contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof/HTML/S...llProTeam.html
• 4th post contains contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof/HTML/S...ookieTeam.html
• After manually editing the POTW template, commish moves thread to WOOF Sports Journal forum.

PREGAME DISCUSSION THREAD FOR NEXT WEEK

• Posted in Web Site Talk And Testing Forum (Forum ID=23.)
• Title is "YYYY Week WW+1 Pregame Discussion." (WW+1 is next game week, in other words.)
• 1st post contains contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof/HTML/WeeklyGames.html
• 2nd post contains contents of http://www.gstelmack.com/woof_test/P...Standings.aspx
• Commish will manually create 3rd post with updating power ratings, and then move thread into General Discussion.

I'm not a developer at all, but I'm not a total nitwit, either. I've installed maybe 20ish mods from these forums, so I'm not uncomfortable messing around in the innards of vbulletin. I guess really I have five specific knowledge items:

1. How to go about adding a button to vbulletin that is only seen by one user group.
2. How to auto-generate posts in a particular forum when that button is pressed.
3. How to auto-pull web page content into a post.
4. How to to pull the game week and year from our database. (They're in a data table called fof_gameinfo in fields called CurYear and Week.)
5. How to create a dynamic link. The woof_export.zip file mentioned above is in a different folder every gameday week. It is always of the format /2010/xxx/woof.export. 2010 is the current season, and xxx (at least for this season, I envision just changing this formula once a season...seasons are roughly 2 1/2 months log, so that's not really a big deal) is equal to 168+(Week*2).

Thoughts? Am I way over my head trying to do this myself? Should I get a web developer who is in my league to do this? (I'd rather have him working on our custom stats pages...) Is this in the realm of something someone here would do for free, or in the realm of something that I should expect to pay someone to do? It *seems* like if I had those five issues above identified, I could take it and run with it, but it may well be that those five are all too complicated for a total noob.

Thanks for reading all of this!

--Ben

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Define "noob". Only a vBulletin noob? Do you have some experience with (web) programming in general, any PHP/MySQL/HTML knowledge?

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

Define "noob". Only a vBulletin noob? Do you have some experience with (web) programming in general, any PHP/MySQL/HTML knowledge?

I have more experience with vbulletin than I do with PHP/MYSQL/HTML. I've run a vbulletin-powered board for five years, but with virtually no modifications. I've run this sim league's board for four months now (LINK), and have gotten comfortable with looking at the code and making multiple template mods play nicely with one another, but that's about it. Very limited HTML/PHP/MYSQL--just commands that I've reverse-engineered when I needed them, then forgotten them later on.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

In that case and if you want to give it a try yourself, you could get most done yourself probably. I would suggest by having a look at our Articles section first.

1. How to go about adding a button to vbulletin that is only seen by one user group.
This can be easily done with a simple Template condition and the HTML to show the button.

2. How to auto-generate posts in a particular forum when that button is pressed.
See the article section on using Data Managers to create threads.

3. How to auto-pull web page content into a post.
This might be the most difficult.

4. How to to pull the game week and year from our database. (They're in a data table called fof_gameinfo in fields called CurYear and Week.)
Should not be much of a problem.

5. How to create a dynamic link.
Also should be pretty easy.

[Ben E Lou]

UPDATE:

About 9 months later, I figured out how to do this. I taught myself php/MySQL and now have an auto-poster for my league that does more than I mentioned in this thread. Thanks again for the help!

Sample: http://www.fof-woof.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7973

[Lynne]

Wow, that's quite something! Good job.