Add-On Releases - CinVin vB Forum Feed Listing

[ BY REQUEST ]

This nifty little utility will present a list of all of your forums RSS feeds on one page! Your users can then easily pick & choose which forums they want to subscribe to via RSS, Google, Yahoo, or Bloglines.

Ever go to a big site like CNN and view their page of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to? This is the same thing but for your vBulletin forums!

In addition to your users, the search engine spiders will love this!

We went out of our way to make sure that this CinVin vBulletin add-on was quick & easy to both install and modify!

• Automatically adds an RSS button to your footer template.
• Correctly shows where your visitors are when viewing the Who's Online page.
• Forums can be specifically excluded from being listed.
• Ability to specify which usergroup to use for permissions when viewing the list of forums.
• "Link" forums can be turned off from showing.
• All options are configured through the vBulletin ACP.
• All descriptions and names are completely phrased so you can quickly add alternate lanquages or change the existing wording.
• All display output is handled through vBulletin templates so you can quickly change the output appearance.
• All templates and phrase are installed as a vBulletin product through your ACP which means there are no file edits!
• Compatible with vBSEO.
• Easy integration with vBadvanced CMPS.
• Debug mode to help you with any problems you may be having.

Installation only take a few moments...

• Unzip the .zip file that you downloaded.
• Upload the single PHP file and single folder in the upload_to_your_forum_folder folder from the download to your forums folder.
• Go into your ACP and select Plugins & Products => Manage Products => Add/Import Product => {Select the CinVin_vB_Forum_Feed_Listing.xml file from the download} => Import

You're all done! Just point your browser to http://www.yoursite.com/forums/cv_rss_feeds.php to view your new RSS feed listings.

DEMO #1: CinVin RSS Feeds (this is the 'stock' version)

DEMO #2: Cool Sci-Fi RSS Feeds (this one has been integrated with vBa CMPS)


FAQ's
- What vB versions? This should work with all versions of vB 3.6.x and above. It should also work with vB 3.5.x but I have not tested it on that version.

- Can I remove the "CinVin" text at the very bottom? NO! Believe it or not that little text is what allows us to work on hacks like this for free and, more importantly, to continue to support them. You are free to move the notice to your footer template, for example, if you would like to keep your notices all together but for removing it entirely a Branding Free license is available through CinVin.

[KW802]

Spinball: What version of vBSEO are you using? Along the way vBSEO changed the name of a function which used to cause that error.

BeakerUK: It should work fine with all of the vB versions up the current vB 3.7.x series. I do not have an installation of vB 3.8 Beta installed yet so I can not verify that one at this time but I can verify that it works fine with 3.7.3 as-is.

[KW802]

I am working on making some tweaks...

What "Wish List" items does anybody have for this?

[AyeCapn]

I'd love some way to substitute FeedBurner or FeedProxy URL's for the ones that are auto-generated by vB.

[KW802]

Originally Posted by AyeCapn

I'd love some way to substitute FeedBurner or FeedProxy URL's for the ones that are auto-generated by vB.

It's been a bit since I've last played with FeedBurner, and thus do not recall how the URLs are structured, but I'll check it out.

Added to the Wish List.

[AyeCapn]

Well, everyone who creates a feedburner feed has to manually approve the name. In my mind it would be a simple substitution. If the user adds a feedburner URL for a specific forum use that. If not, use the autogenerated one.

In my case I have one FeedBurner feed for the main external.php RSS 2.0 feed. Instead of www.myforum.com/forum/external.php I want it to use www.feedburner.com/MyFeedName

[KW802]

Originally Posted by AyeCapn

Well, everyone who creates a feedburner feed has to manually approve the name. In my mind it would be a simple substitution. If the user adds a feedburner URL for a specific forum use that. If not, use the autogenerated one.

In my case I have one FeedBurner feed for the main external.php RSS 2.0 feed. Instead of www.myforum.com/forum/external.php I want it to use www.feedburner.com/MyFeedName

It turns out that there is an API for FeedBurner that supposedly allows you to create new feeds to your account as well. I have not played with it yet (last night was spent reading up on it) but it appears that a client can pass a user's name & password to to feedburner along with the name & URL of a new feed to burn. If that is true,then I've got a few ideas up my sleeve.

[AyeCapn]

Wow... that's hot.

The biggest draw is actually Google's FeedProxy since it allows us to insert Google Ads inside our feeds. I think the 2 are related somehow.

[djwins]

You can use feedburner to display google ads in your feeds. Google owns Feedburner.

Anticipating future updates to this mod...especially the feedburner stuff.

[Doug Nelson]

Yes, I'd like a way to include adsense ads, as well.

[KW802]

After AyeCapn suggested FeedBurner I checked it out a bit.

The problem is FeedBurner does not allow dynamic feeds so every forum (or other RSS source on your site) needs to pre-configured as a FeedBurner channel first. The FeedBurner API allows remote creation of the channels which is a good thing. But even with that there is no clean way of mapping the the vB forums to the newly created FeedBurner channels. There are two different possible mapping methods I'm exploring but most likely it won't be in the next release. The next release is shaping up to be a maintenance release with some tweaks done but not the FeedBurner stuff yet.