VBSyndicate Hack V1

Synopsis

This hack allows webmaster to provide syndicated VB content to other webmasters such as Latest topics, Latest Polls or calendar entries to other webmasters for inclusion on their websites. The webmasters using the feeds do NOT need PHP, PERL, MYSQL, ASP just a javascript enabled browser.

Requirements

* Crontab
* The ability to run PHP via the command line

Example

http://cpfc.org/news/newsfeed.html

Please note the documentation is sketchy and if your aren't savvy with hacking code yourself then maybe you should wait until the documentation is up to speed.

[Steve Machol]

Nope, I'm not running PHP in cgi-mode. Any other ideas? I really want to get this one working.

[Dave#]

Originally posted by smachol
Nope, I'm not running PHP in cgi-mode. Any other ideas? I really want to get this one working.

your on linux?

try

locate php|more

search through until you find a binary rather than a directory

[Steve Machol]

Dave,

/usr/bin/php is the binary.

bash:/usr/bin$ ls -al ph*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1066892 Mar 3 2001 php

[Dave#]

Steve:

1) Can you run any php scripts via the command line?
2) Is your path to config.php correct?

[Steve Machol]

1. Apparently not. I tried with a couple of other scripts and got the same error. How do I get around this?

2. Yes, otherwise my forums would cease to function.

Thanks!

[Dave#]

1. Apparently not. I tried with a couple of other scripts and got the same error. How do I get around this?

Build php4 again without Apache support in another directory on your server? What is your OS? You might be able to download a pre-compiled binary from somewhere.

[Steve Machol]

I'm running RedHat 7.1. I'm not going to take a chance on rebuilding PHP. If something went wrong my forums would stop operating and I can't run that risk.

Also I just tested a couple of other PHP scripts from the command line and they executed just fine. It's only scripts that access a database that give me this problem.

[Scott MacVicar]

use lynx its a browser that comes with nearly every linux distrib and you can just execute the script as if you just typed it in to your browser.

Just use the following

/usr/bin/lynx -dump http://url.com/to/activefeed.php

thats what i've done to get it to work as i was getting same error.

[Steve Machol]

Thanks PPN! That now works to create the latest_topics.txt file. However I now have another problem when I try to use the resulting script. You can see for yourself at:

http://www.optiboard.com/activefeed.html

[Scott MacVicar]

I rewrote nearly all of the code within this to do the following things, select latest topics from all forums that are open to users with groupid 1. It also writes to a .js file and the code should have been

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://yourdomain/forums/latest_topics.js"></script>

the language was missed out
also the ? needs escaped for both php and javascript so you need \\?

i done this in my version and also made it work with ./global.php instead of connected within the file.

New attachment two posts below.