The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

About Developer · **Released**: 06-18-2001

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:

Code:

  <!--#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.

Code:

#!/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.

#12 06-28-2001, 07:07 AM

Ok, I imstalled both the .cgi and .php versions on a test page, but neither worked. Here's the gist of the page:

PHP Code:


			
<HTML>

<HEAD>

   <BASEFONT face="Verdana, Arial, helvetica" size="2">

   <content="4; URL=http://www.lilymud.com/forum/">

   <META name="Author" CONTENT="Lilymud">

   <META name="Description" content="">

   <META name="Keywords" content="">   

<TITLE>Test</TITLE>

<STYLE TYPE="text/css">

<!--

BODY {

    SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: 000080;

    SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: ffffff;

}

SELECT {

    FONT-FAMILY: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;

    FONT-SIZE: 9px;

    COLOR: black;

    BACKGROUND-COLOR: #CFCFCF

}

TEXTAREA, .bginput {

    FONT-SIZE: 10px;

    FONT-FAMILY: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;

    COLOR: black;

    BACKGROUND-COLOR: #CFCFCF

}

A:link, A:visited, A:active {

    COLOR: FFFFFF;

TEXT-DECORATION: underline;

}

A:hover {

    COLOR: ffffcc;

TEXT-DECORATION: none;

}

    -->

</STYLE>

</script>

</head>



<body bgcolor="#666696">



<p>&nbsp;</p>

<blockquote>

  <blockquote>

    <blockquote>

      <blockquote>

 <p align="center"><font face="Arial">Text/article here.</font></p>



        <p align="center"><font face="Arial"></font></p>

       [b]<!--#include virtual=/discussion_link.php?topic=Topic+Title+Here&forum=13 -->[/b]



    

      </blockquote>

    </blockquote>

  </blockquote>

</blockquote>

</body>

</html>

What am I doing wrong? I'm not extremely familiar with the #include option.

For reference, here's my discussion_link.php page (password/username starred out for security reasons..duh):

PHP Code:


			
<?

############################################################################

#  Per-Site Variable Settings

############################################################################



   $username = "*******";

   $password = "*******";

   $database = "lilymud";

   $forumpath = "http://www.lilymud.com/forum"; # no trailing /



############################################################################

   

   $link = db_connect() or exit();

   $query = "SELECT title FROM forum WHERE forumid = $forum";



   $result = mysql_query("$query") or exit();



   if (mysql_num_rows($result)) {

      while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

         $forum_name = $row["title"];

      }

   }



   $quoted_title = addslashes($topic);

   $query = "SELECT threadid FROM thread WHERE forumid = $forum AND title = \"$quoted_title\"";

   $result = mysql_query("$query") or exit();

   if (mysql_num_rows($result)) {

      while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

         $threadid = $row["threadid"];

      }

   }

   $topic = str_replace(" ", "+", $topic);

  

   if ($threadid <= 0) {

      print "<A HREF=\"$forumpath/newthread.php?s=&action=newthread&forumid=$forum&subject=$topic\">Start a Conversation!</A>";

   } else {

     print ("<A HREF=\"$forumpath/showthread.php?s=&threadid=$threadid\">Join the Conversation!</A>");

   }



function db_connect ()

{

    global $username, $password, $database;

    $link = @mysql_pconnect("localhost", $username, $password);

    if ($link && mysql_select_db($database)) return($link);

    return(FALSE);

}



?>

#13 06-30-2001, 01:57 PM

Can anyone help..?

#14 06-30-2001, 06:35 PM

The #include will only work if your Apache web server supports server-side includes (SSI). With regard to the PHP version that akiy posted - you just have to include it in using PHPs include syntax:

PHP Code:


			
<? include "/path/to/your/script/whatever.php"; ?>

Cheers.

Juan · #15 07-01-2001, 10:46 PM

This looks like a nice hack!

I am testing it with the php version. I have named it discussion.php and uploaded it to the forums directory.

What is exactly what I need to include below to make sure it starts or joins in a conversation?

<? include "/path/to/my/forums/discussion.php"; ?>

The way it is, it just displays a blank page.

#16 07-02-2001, 06:51 AM

OK, that worked, but now I recieve this error where the link should be.

Warning: open_basedir restriction in effect. File is in wrong directory in /home/sites/site207/web/browse.php on line 306

Warning: Failed opening '/discussion_link.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:..:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/sites/site207/web/browse.php on line 306

The usr/local/lib/php would be necessary? I wasn't aware php required a bin.. but I'm a novice, so eh.. is there any quick fix to this?

#17 07-04-2001, 12:46 PM

#18 07-04-2001, 03:20 PM

I would guess your include path is not the full path - if your on a shared server this is likely to be the case - you may need to add sometheing like www/public_html/ infront of your path. You cant set a .htaccess to stop you having to do this repetitively (which I have done) - but don't ask me how off my head. - do a search.

#19 07-04-2001, 06:11 PM

this is the full, absolute location.

<? include "/home/sites/site207/web/discussion_link.php"; ?>

I insert that text, on .php pages, .cgi pages, .html pages.. no luck. its blank on all of them. Not so much as an error anymore.

#20 07-05-2001, 07:09 AM

Have you tried it without the starting / ie <? include ("home/sites/site207/web/discussion_link.php"); ?> ??

I doubt this would be the prob though as you would get 'file not found error' - unless you have turned off error reporting.

PS. I haven't tried this hack yet, so I may be missing something.

#21 07-05-2001, 07:34 PM

Warning: open_basedir restriction in effect. File is in wrong directory in /home/sites/site207/web/get.php on line 144

Warning: Failed opening 'home/sites/site207/web/discussion_link.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:..:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/sites/site207/web/get.php on line 144

Got this again. Do you think the first "open_basedir" is a setting, perhaps a permissions setting that needs to be configured? I did a google search for this error text, and it appears to be VERY common.

X vBulletin 3.8.12 by vBS Debug Information
Page Generation 0.08672 seconds Memory Usage 2,314KB Queries Executed 25 (?)
More Information
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