RSS Feeds on Forumhome and Other vb Pages

This product adds support for displaying RSS feeds on 1 or more vb pages.

The product will create 5 plugins and a new section, RSS Feed Processing, under vBulletin Options. Also added will be 2 new templates appropriately grouped under 'RSS Feed Templates'.

Configuration

Change the settings in 'vBulletin Options -> RSS Feed Processing' to suit your particular needs.

One thing that proves difficult for some users is creating the 'cache' directory. This directory needs to be CHMOD 777 and it should reside outside the web root. All of the RSS feeds will be cached in that location so depending on how the product is configured (i.e. allowing users to define their own feeds) the size of the directory could grow signficantly.

An advanced feature that is only available for non-user specified feeds is the ability to include code to filter and/or modify the feed content. If the feeds are being provided for your users this can prove to be a very powerful tool.

Placing the content on pages

As supplied the RSS Feed content will be displayed below the "What's Going On" block. This may be changed by modifying the 'RSS Feed - Content Generation' plugin in different ways.

1. Find where you want the output in the FORUMHOME template and change the search sttring accordingly.
2. Delete all the search-related text and manually edit the template(s) where you want the content to appear.

In either a) or b) above you may also change the hook location for the 'RSS Feed - Content Generation' plugin so it runs where it's needed. If the content is desired on multiple vb pages then the plugin could be moved to init_startup so long as the template edit logic is removed.

The RSS feed content is placed in the $feedcontent array with an entry for each feed. To manually place the feeds in templates refer to the entries for 3 feeds as $feedcontent[0], $feedcontent[1] and $feedcontent[2]. If the content for a given feed cannot be decoded then that array entry will be empty.

Revisions

1.00 RC2 16-Jan-2006
Added support to allow the displayed feeds to collapse when not a user-specified feed.

• Modified the rss_feed_rss template
• Updated the RSS Feed - Function plugin

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Do not reproduce or publish elsewhere without my written permission.

[GamerJunk.net]

Nevermind I got it working

[noreturn]

can some one tell me what I am doing wrong?

My test board is located public_html/test.

I only get these errors back and never get it to work.


Warning: file_get_contents( http://scripts.ign.com/rss/ign.all.2.0.xml): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /includes/init.php(292) : eval()'d code on line 218

Warning: file_get_contents( http://www.dreamstation.cc/rss/dreamstationcc.xml): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /includes/init.php(292) : eval()'d code on line 218

Thanks All

[tgmorris]

Originally Posted by noreturn

can some one tell me what I am doing wrong?

My test board is located public_html/test.l

Check to make sure your cache directory has the correct permissions (chmod 777) and that the path is correct.

[EricaJoy]

hey i totally missed this when it was first posted. thanks!

[dethfire]

how do we limit the descriptions to say 100 characters and then add (...)?

[EricaJoy]

this definitely great! word of the day is already up and running on my board. a question though, is it possible to have the user defined rss show up on the users profile page (MEMBERINFO template)?

[iambic]

Installed without problems, left all settings as their defaults, added an rss feed, which is cached correctly in the cache folder, but nothing gets generated in my forum's home page at http://support.iambic.com/forum/

ideas?

- Adriano

[tgmorris]

Originally Posted by iambic

Installed without problems, left all settings as their defaults, added an rss feed, which is cached correctly in the cache folder, but nothing gets generated in my forum's home page at http://support.iambic.com/forum/

ideas?

- Adriano

Double check to make sure the plugins are all active. Other than that you might manually edit the template as a test to see if the $feedcontent array is being populated.

The other possibility is that the feed, although cached, can't be processed for some reason. This will also cause the symptoms you are seeing.

What's the feed url you are using?

[iambic]

thanks Tom for the quick reply -- looks like it didn't like much the atom feed, while with the RSS feed works fine.

I was trying to use the following without luck:
http://www.iampowered.com/atom.xml

so I switched to this one instead
http://www.iampowered.com/index.xml

perhaps the plugin doesn't currently support atom feeds... I should have double checked the infos above first

- Adriano

[silly rabbit]

Originally Posted by tgmorris

Check to make sure your cache directory has the correct permissions (chmod 777) and that the path is correct.

tg, great hack. For whatever reason however it is only working intermittently for me. Sometimes fine (often have to do a 'refresh') and sometimes no - FORUMHOME page completely fails to load. I know it's rss hack related. When working I noticed display alternates with each 'refresh'. (gone - displayed - gone - etc . . .???)

Note: I know I have one issue with '777' permissions as my server only allows '755' max but appears to working(albeit intermittently) nonetheless.

See explaination from hosting company: Implementation of PHPsuexec.

When you say 'outside the web root' do you mean anywhere except alongside 'public_html'??

thx!! Rabbit