AboutToday - Bring RSS Feeds and Daily Events to Your Site!

What is AboutToday?

AboutToday provides a central place to bring daily items of interest to your forum visitors. It includes two main components: an RSS Reader System and Local Events database System.

Please NOTE: This mod has been modified for vb ver 3.6.4. It should work on vb ver 3.5.4 and 3.6.x.

1. An RSS Reader system where the admin can enter RSS feeds that will then be displayed on the page. RSS feeds can be set to AUTOMATICALLY create threads or be set so that users can easily create a thread from a feed.. Feeds can be read via fopen or cURL.
   
   
   
   
   
   The RSS Feeds are fully intergrated with vbAdvanced and could actually be placed anywhere you want!!
   
2. A database system that can hold unlimited categories of "AboutToday" events. For example, you could have a history category (like a Today in History) with sub-categories for different eras in history. Or, you could have a daily joke or software tip of the day, etc.
   
   The "Add Event" feature is intended to help you if you want for example - Sports: Today in History. With the vb calendar, you cannot have categories and you are restricted with how far back the dates can go.
   
   
   
   
   So with the "Add Event" feature, you could have a category tree like:
   • Hockey
     • Professional
     • College
     • High School
   • Football
     • American Football
     • The Rest of the World (Soccer)
   • Baseball
   
   with the normal calendar feature, you cannot have categories. And with "Add Event" you can have any date. So, if you want an event like "Jan 1, 132 B.C. - the first ball was invented", you can do that. But, that isn't possible in the normal calendar. Also, the events in "Add Event" are fully searchable.

Installation

Copy the following files to your server in the forums directory:

abouttoday.php
includes/class.csv.php
includes/class_abouttoday.php
includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php
includes/xml/bitfield_abouttoday.xml
includes/xml/cpnav_abouttoday.xml
admincp/abouttodayadmin.php

From the admincp, import the product file product-abouttoday.xml (Manage Products - Add/Import Product).

REFRESH your admincp window. You should now see a listing in the left column of the admincp for "AboutToday".

Getting Started

NOTE - if this is a new install, a Yahoo RSS Feed and CNN Entertainment Feed have been automatically added to give you a feel for how the product looks.

If you plan to use the RSS Feeds:

1. From the admincp, select AboutToday - RSS Feeds. Add an RSS Feed.
2. From the admincp, select Usergroups - Usergroup Manager. Add permissions so the Administrator group can use the product.
3. From your forum directory, bring up the file abouttoday.php.
4. If you want the feeds to AUTOMATICALLY create threads, go to admincp - abouttoday - settings. There you must set the userid of the account to use to create the thread. Then, edit the RSS Feed with the forumid of where the threads for that feed should be created!

If you plan to create your own "today in history" type of database:

1. From the admincp, select AboutToday - Categories. Add a category.
2. From your forum directory, bring up the file abouttoday.php. "Add" your first event to the category you have created!

Version Status
I've tested this product extensively but ... use this totally at your own risk!

Credits
I learned a lot about how to code this and used a lot of the code from what Ron1n did with ecDownloads. What I've learned from his code while helping to support ecDownloads has been invaluable.

Sites Using this Product
Visit www.armchairgeneral.com to see this product in action.

Click Install!
Please Click Install if you are using this product. Thanks!

[gasxtreme]

Originally Posted by westpointer

Do you get any feeds to work?

Yes I do, half work, half don't :-/
-steve

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by gasxtreme

Yes I do, half work, half don't :-/
-steve

If you want to PM me with your site url plus an admin login, I'll see if I can figure out anything.

[Rakehel]

Originally Posted by westpointer

Let me get the easy one first then I'll get the rest later today. For the "Talk About It" button to appear:

AdminCP->AboutToday->RssFeeds

In the Add feeds area, third option from the bottom you will see a box where you can put a forum number in. Set that to the forum you want each feed to be posted in. That will cause the buttons to appear so members can post them.

Duh! OK, dumb question, I could've sworn I checked that.

BTW: the feed is functioning perfectly with vB Advanced, just a couple of minor setting changes needed in vBA and a couple of radio butons to click in AboutToday's panel and it was a piece of cake after following the steps for the add-on template setup.

[gasxtreme]

westpointer > PM Sent

Thanks Much
-steve

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by gasxtreme

westpointer > PM Sent

Thanks Much
-steve

Two of the feeds are giving errors for an invalid character. http://www.moparmusclemagazine.com/r...andard_rss.xml and http://www.superchevy.com/rss/nonstandard_rss.xml have problems. In the attached pic, see the funny looking question mark?



That's blowing up the program. I'm going to work on a better way to handle this error over the weekend. I need to have it skip that feed and send the admin an email about the problem instead of having the whole program die. For now, if you delete those feeds, you'll be back in business until I can improve the error handling.

[gasxtreme]

Okay, not a problem. Thank You for checking that out for me.
-steve

[gasxtreme]

Found another feed that doesn't work, but I can't find the error symbol in it....

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...evy&output=rss

"XML error: Invalid character at line 1"

Thanks
-steve

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by gasxtreme

Found another feed that doesn't work, but I can't find the error symbol in it....

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...evy&output=rss

"XML error: Invalid character at line 1"

Thanks
-steve

okay, I have ... had ... a fix ready until my @$%@$@$%@$% laptop took a nose dive yesterday. I'll try to post some new files later today.

[Brandon Sheley]

will this work on 3.6 ?

[murph5]

Great mod! Just couple of things though, i have set to auto create new threads, which it did, but those threads only show up for me in the top x stats mod and the latest threads mod. They don't appear as a new thread on the forumhome or actually in the forum itself! And the userid that posts the RSS threads hstill has a 0 post count. Am i missing something here?

Also, if i have about today disabled on forumhome, how can i force the rss to update...or does it happen automagicly? Using latest stable version of vB 3.5.4 and vbseo. TIA