Dynamic Announcements: Programmable Forum Home Announcement/Message with conditionals

This hack allows you to post powerful dynamic announcements (changing according to different conditions) on forum home page. It differs from vbulletin's default announcements in 2 ways:

• The announcement is displayed in forum home page, not inside thread view. So visitors will read them on home page without clicking any links.
• The Hack's announcements are not static: ie. they can be powerfully programmed to display themselves according to many conditions.

This hack is the VB3 version of my Dynamic Forum Home Announcement Hack and it is a bit more improved in that it is now able to display your announcement as it was before AND also in DHTML popup box as well which ever you prefer better or even both. (DHTML poupup announcement is not technically a popup so popup killers can not kill it either.)

Basic Usage : You can set a text in your Admin CP and it's displayed in forum home to all users.

Advanced Usage : With conditionals you can set different texts/notifications/messages/announcements and they will be displayed if your pre-configured condition applies. This allows you to create powerful announcements/private messages/texts which address their receipt only if a certain condition is met. Some examples:

You can set to show an announcement in forum home IF:

1. user is X
2. user's usergroup is Y
3. his profile field Z is X
4. user has X posts or has more than Y posts but less than Z posts
5. his last visit time was X days ago
6. today is X, hour is between Y and Z, day is wednesday, month is Y, week is month's 2nd week, today is user's birthday
7. User is invisible/visible
8. his timeset is set to A
9. etc.

It's tested in vb versions from v.3.0.0 to 3.0.9 and works fine with all of them. It will work for all future 3.0.x versions too. For vb2 version click here.

Here is a Screenshot from a general table announcement.
Here is a Screenshot from a popup announcement.

Some Features:

• It's Admin CP integrated (Screenshot)
• Smiley, BBCode, HTML, IMG tags are supported in announcements.
• You can address your users with their usernames inside announcements (Use $bbuserinfo[username] variable)
• Announcements are displayed directly in Forum Home so users are forced to read them.
• The Conditionals help you to design powerful and ever changing announcements/private messages/forum home notifications.
• Poupup announcement can not be killed by popup killer software

If you install the hack, click INSTALL, thank you..

Hacks of the hack:
* Hack 1: Puts the announcement into header instead of forum home page so that announcement appears in all forum pages.
* Hack 2: Integrates announcement with vBA_CMPS portal hack.
* Hack 3: Popup announcement will popup once in every XX hours.


Logician \\=^))

[Mu5icMan]

any thought on how to display the annoucement only once, as when they login for the first time

[Logician]

Originally Posted by Mu5icMan

there is. when you said, http://YOUR_SITE_URL/FORUM_URL/admin...le=dynamic_fha

if your site uses https:// as mine does and you don't include the secue layer you will recieve parse error 16

I'm sorry but I don't think this is something I can consider on hack author's end. If your site uses https://, then you should obviously call your YOUR_SITE_URL/FORUM_URL/admincp as https://

[Mu5icMan]

I agree it's not the hack authors issue.

I was just pointing out to people that had https should use it.

[Leeper]

The features are fantasic on my forum pages but my CMPS page has been cut in half. any ideas? I tried installing the CMPS hack as well to no avail. Any help would be appriciated!

[Leeper]

I applied the additional hack to move the announcement into the header. As a result my CMPS page now works fine (no announcement though), and the announcement didn't budge on the forums page. Unless I get someone willing to take a look and help dissect the problems I’ll leave this hack as is. It a great hack however, because of the work that my predecessors have done to the navbar and header I’m getting weird reactions to the tweaks. I’d like to get this working with CMPS but until I understand this stuff a bit better or get some help, I’ll leave a working product alone.

Thanks Logician for your hard work, this is a very powerful tool for getting info to users.

[Mla7a6]

How can I change the background color of the DHTML popup window?
It is very sharp and eye hurting.. while I would like to choose a smoother that can be seen as part of my board style??

BTW.. nice hack

[Logician]

Originally Posted by Mla7a6

How can I change the background color of the DHTML popup window?

Please read through the thread. Asked and answered before.

[Mu5icMan]

Logician, any thoughts on my previous posting.

how to display the annoucement only once, as when they login for the first time

[Logician]

Originally Posted by Mu5icMan

Logician, any thoughts on my previous posting.

how to display the annoucement only once, as when they login for the first time

I can't see a way to do what you wanted since vbulletin does not keep a record of first time logins.

However if you want, you can make an announcement only visible to member who are:
a) with 0 posts and/or registered XX days ago
and/or
b) in Email confirmation waiting group

So this should cover most of the people you are targetting.

[Wolverine]

Installed but have one problem.

I created a popup announcement. It displays as expected but wont close. The close button is there, it reacts when moused over and clicked, but the window remains.

Thought maybe was a firefox issue so I tried IE, same problem.