Add-On Releases - vB News Ticker - Your Blogs RSS Feeds and Forums in a Marquee

What does this do?

It allows you to take your news from your forums (up to 10), blogs (up to 10), and/or RSS feeds (up to 10) and display them in a ticker (marquee).
You have a choice on how many you can pull from each forum as a whole or select your whole site, how fast you want the ticker to scroll, the length of the title of each news item, colors, etc. You can also add RSS feeds and the latest blogs.



Install Instructions

Step 1:
Fresh Install
If you intend to use the RSS features, upload the RSS folder to the root of your forums.
If you rename this folder or change the location, you MUST edit the path in the XML file for each of the require_once 'rss/rss_fetch.inc'; paths.
Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-davidw_vbnews_ticker.xml
Click Import

Upgrade Options:
Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-davidw_vbnews_ticker.xml
[If upgrading] Click the button next to Yes in Allow Overwrite
Click Import
You will probably want to revert any templates you have altered as most changes people have requested are now integrated.


Step 2:
Edit the admincp options
*** IMPORTANT ***
Make sure that if you do not enter an item in the forumIDs after the first one, the rest must be set to 0
- if it is not set to 0 or a forumid number, it will result in a database error.


Step 3:
Go to your admin Control Panel => Styles & Templates => Style Manager
Find your Master/Parent style or the style you wish to add this to and drop down the All Style Options menu dropdown and choose Edit Templates
Click Go if it does not redirect you
For your Forums Directory:

Open up your Forum Home Templates subdirectory and choose your FORUMHOME template

Find:

PHP Code:

<!-- main --> 


Add above:

PHP Code:

$vbnews_ticker 


Click Save & Reload

For all your web pages (Navigation Bar)
Open up your Navigation / Breadcrumb Templates subdirectory and choose Navbar template

Find:

PHP Code:

<!-- / nav buttons bar -->

<br /> 


Add Below (You may want to remove the <br /> for aesthetics):

PHP Code:

$vbnews_ticker 


Click Save & Reload


Frequently Asked Questions

How do I add the news ticker to my vB Advanced?
To get the ticker in your vbadvanced, you need to add global output variables
Admin CP => vBa CMPS => Default Settings => Portal Output Global Variables and put vbnews_ticker in there.

How do I add the news ticker to the IBProArcade or Photoplog?
Thanks to Mark.B for his add - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=144

Why does this seem slow?
For a couple links or for a couple displayed items per link/news item, it should display fine, but as you add more (fill up) each potential slot and up the number of items to pull it will take longer to load. It it easy to add up fast. This uses anywhere from 1-30 queries depending on how many you use.

What is the forumid?
The forumid is the id of the forum you have created. Each forum has its own unique number assigned to it. When you click on a forum link you can see a number that is assigned to it. This will show up in the URL of the page you are browsing. Another way of seeing the forumid is to go to your admin control panel => Forums & Moderators => Forum Manager => Click on [Expand All] and then move your mouse over (hover) any of the forums you've created. Your status bar (bottom of screen) should display your forumid (number at the end of the link/url).

How do I change the colors?
It's an admincp option now
Ticker Background Color: If you leave this blank, it will stay your forum colors. If you put in a hex value, it will change to that color.
Please use 000000 - FFFFFF only.

Ticker Color: If you leave this blank, it will stay your forum colors. If you put in a hex value, it will change to that color.
Please use 000000 - FFFFFF only.

If you want alternating colors do this (You need to edit the plugin to make this work.):
Find:

PHP Code:

$ticker_titles             .= '<a href="showthread.php?t='. $ticker['threadid'] .'" title="'. $ticker['title'] .'" target="blank">'. $ticker['title'] .'</a> '. $ticksep.''; 


Replace With:

PHP Code:

$tick_color                = ($color % 2) ? $color1 : $color2;
                $ticker_titles             .= '<a href="showthread.php?t='. $ticker['threadid'] .'" title="'. $ticker['title'] .'" target="blank"><font color="'. $tick_color .'">'. $ticker['title'] .'</font></a> '. $ticksep .'';
                $color++; 


How do I put in (absolute) links directly to the location rather than relative links?
In the plugin, find each instance of
showthread.php?t= (or whatever the page is)

and change part to a full url.
Example:
http://www.yoursite.com/showthread.php?t=

[davidw]

This is something that might be doable - but only if this option were the only option (kind of like how the forums option is either ALL forums or selected forums).

[Mr Morningstarr]

Is there a way of changing this from marquee to blinking?

[davidw]

Anything is possible - if you can get it to work. All you have to do is change the template. Find the marquee and change it to what you want. I have tried three or four different types but have had limited success, however, depending on what you want to do it may work. Edit the template and find the marquee - change that to blinking text (whichever you want to use).

[alghazali]

Does it display the post Icon as well? I want something that can do that.

[davidw]

No, not yet - but that is going to be part of one of the future updates.

[ShadowAssassin1]

Okay, here is an interesting question

Can you make it so that it refreshes every x seconds (Which I can specify )

Also, it won't refresh the whole page, just that particular thing

Thanks for this - installed!

[tnedator]

Does anyone know how I would need to mod this so that when you click on a ticker item it opens in the existing window, rather than a new one?

Edit: For clarification, I would only like the forum based ticker to open in the same window. If I add RSS ticker items, I would want them to open in a new window.

I tried modifying the plugin and tried changing to target = "self" and Target = "parent" in the thread ticker areas, but that didn't change it to open in the same window.

$ticker_titles 			.= '<a style="text-decoration:none" href="showthread.php?t='. $ticker['threadid'] .'" title="'. $ticker['title'] .'" target="parent"><font color="#'. $tickcolor .'">'. $ticker['prefix_rich'] .' '. $ticker['title'] .'</font></a> '. $ticksep.'';

[zelnik]

Hi David,

Every now and then my site will either crash or crawl so it is unusable.

Most of the time I have put it down to a server blip but I've just had one again and actually called my host and got them to diagnose it while I was on the phone.

They have emailed me with the following error:

Our systems admin has had a look at your site and found that it is requesting some xml from

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news.xml which is responding very slowly, it’s not a load problem with our servers.



poll([{fd=7, events=POLLOUT}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=7, revents=POLLOUT}])

sendto(7, "`\224\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\3www\20typicallyspanis" ..., 42, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 42

poll([{fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 1, 5000 <unfinished ...>



You will need to take a look at the code and change that if you want it to run quicker.

Does this mean anything to you? and if it is a problem retrieving a xml feed from a down or slow site is there any code within the plugin to timeout and forget about it until the next scheduled time it checks the feed?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as ever.

[Fynnon]

I`m using this on vB 3.8.3 to display on index page the latest posts from a news site and it works great so far 10x

Only one little issue: the quotes(") are shown as question marks (?)

DEMO: http://bvlist.com

[davidw]

What kind of HTML Character Set are you using? You can find this information in your Language Manager under Languages & Phrases. Click edit on your language.

Don't forget to click install.