[ Release v2.0.1 ] External discussion links (join/start a conversation!)

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:

  <!--#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.

#!/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.

Sorry its lost me - maybe its a host thing - contact them.

I've a Question to the cgi-version (php works fine *g*)... When my DB is not stored on localhost, what have I to add?

Originally posted by Deacon Frost
I've a Question to the cgi-version (php works fine *g*)... When my DB is not stored on localhost, what have I to add?

Change:

# Connect to mySQL

$dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:vbulletin", "id", "password");

to:

# Connect to mySQL

$dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:vbulletin:xyz.mydomain.com", "id", "password");

Cheers.

[Juan]

Can someone please explain this hack better, I cannot get it to work. Instructions are not that clear to me.

This isn't a "hack", but a simple add-on script. What problems are you having specifically? "I can't get it to work" doesn't tell us a whole lot.

[Juan]

Thank you for your reply.

I don't undertand/know what code I need to add in the comment/join converstation to make it work.

[tamarian]

This is a great script.

I just added it (the PHP version) and it works.

Just one problem when the title of the page contains '#' it halts.

I tried htmlspecial chars, and stripslashes but they didn't change the behaviour. Any tricks to make it work with '#"?

[tamarian]

Another observation. If the page title ($topic) had an '&' it will trim it to just before the '&'

My guess is that the php parser expects a variable following &.

Example:

$topic = "Sweet & Sour" will create a thread titled "Sweet"

htnlspecialchars won't help, it will replace & with & !!

Any ideas?

With the PHP version of this script, you'll need to use urlencode() to encode the title before passing it along. There are similar solutions for Perl scripts out there as well.

[tamarian]

Yes, this fixed both of my problems, the & and #.

Thanks!