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!

[thenetbox]

Do you know how I can get the Item description to post when I click on "Talk About it"?

Currently, when I click on Talk about it, it only posts the link in a thead.

Also is there an easy way to make it so that when a user clicks "Talk about it", it goes to an edit page with the RSS text in it to allow a user to write some of his/her own commentary and then click on Submit to post it?

[shanemcse]

Originally Posted by westpointer

The only other way (if your board has low activity) is for me to write a file that can be run via cron. I'll look into doing that.

Yes please create a file. That would be great.:banana: :banana: :banana: I would be willing to donate some funds for your efforts.

Any news on this? I know there are a lot of people with low activity sites that would like to have the updates.

Thanks

[msidnam]

This looks like what i have been looking for. unfortunately i dont have the time to read 26 pages of posts. could someone (perhaps the programmer or someone using the program and follwing the thread) give me a summary of how the program is working and what other features/tweaks are available for it since the first page?

[blogtorank]

Perfect hack here, however how about implementing a way to drop a list of RSS Feeds into the Admin area:

[url]http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&output=rss&q=webmaster[/url]
[url]http://news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/news_story_search_rss/index.html?p=webmaster[/url]
[url]http://search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?format=rss&FORM=RSNR&q=webmaster[/url]

Something of that nature. One per line perhaps. So far what I see is total love for revolving content!

I am loving this mod.

Is there a way to default to list view?

[msidnam]

I cant seem to get the About Today area to show up in my AdminCP.

Edit: Got it working. i had a couple files in the wrong directory. sorry.

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by msidnam

I cant seem to get the About Today area to show up in my AdminCP.

Edit: Got it working. i had a couple files in the wrong directory. sorry.

No problem! I hope you find it useful for your site.

This thread needs a list of good feeds to add!

[shanemcse]

Originally Posted by Chris-777

This thread needs a list of good feeds to add!

After doing lots of research and adding feeds from sites like CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, LATimes, etc. I found a much easier and better way to do it. Google allows you to add a feed for any keyword, keywords, phrases, etc. Plus it pulls the news from all kinds of sources including the ones I listed above. All the URL's are the same except for the keywords you want to pull from so you could easily add multiple feeds without even getting the URL from google. Just edit the URL yourself.

This feed pulls news for "California" related subjects.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&q=California&output=rss

This feed pulls news for "Texas" related subjects.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=Texas&output=rss

This feed pulls news for "Los angeles" using los+angeles

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&q=los+angeles&output=rss

This feed pulls news for anything with the keywords:

Damascus,hezbollah,israel,Lebanon,Beirut,Syria,Hai fa

http://news.google.com/news?svnum=10...us&ie=UTF-8&q=Damascus,+OR+hezbollah,+OR+israel,+OR+Lebanon,+OR+ Beirut,+OR+Syria,+OR+Haifa&output=rss

Those are examples of ways to edit the URL yourself and add the feeds without using the google site. For the 1st few you should use the google site until you get the hang of it. Use this link to create your own specific URL feeds.

http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&q=

Google has the below RSS feeds to help get you started.

Top Stories
World
U.S.
Business
Sci/Tech
Sports
Entertainment
Health
Most Popular

[Renada]

Could you please tell me which template I need to edit to put "About Today" "Add" "Manage Events" etc from the main page into a table so the links stand out more - and the same with the "Latest discussions" down the left hand side?

Thanks,
Renada