Any-forum News hack

We've all seen plenty of news hacks here before. I'm talking about a hack that gets all new threads in a specific forum and shows the first post from the new threads on a separate, non-vB page. These hacks usually show a specific number of threads that you specify, or all threads from the past number of days that you specify. The forum that these threads come from is setup by you, by putting the forumid numbers in a variable in the hack's code file.

I feel that this is a limited system. You are limited to posting news items only in the one or few threads that you specify up front are to be used to get news items from, and then those forums are limited to only posting news items in (because every new thread in it becomes a news item). This just didn't seem like the best solution to me, because if I wanted to cover a particular topic, for example, computer hardware, I would have to have two separate forums: One to post hardware news, and one for non-news items like help and tips.

So what makes my hack different is that you can now post news items in ANY forum. When you post a new thread, there will be a new option in the same area as "parse urls" and "disable smilies"; this new option is called, "make a news item?" If you leave that box unchecked, the thread gets posted as normal. But if you check it, then not only does the thread get posted, but it will also show up on a separate page. So now, you can post news items and non-news items in the same forum, in any forum, and only the threads you want to be news items will show up as news items.

I have set up a permission for this checkbox, so it will only appear for the usergroups you want it to appear for. Setting this permission is just like setting any other usergroup permission, like the ability for the usergroup to post new threads, move threads, download attachments, etc.

You can change the news status of a thread, in other words, change a thread from being a news item to not a news item, or vice-versa, via a new option that appears on the Edit Thread screen from the Admin Tools.

This hack also includes a simple "latest threads" feature, that on the same page as the news items will show the most recently-replied to threads (the most recently active threads). I did these two things together because I knew they would be very similar to code, and would appear on the same page. However, each part is completely separate from the other part, and it is very easy to only use one part of the hack or the other.

Here is an image of the checkbox:


Here is the new permission setup (by default, for any new usergroups you create, this permission will be set to 'NO'):


There is a working demo of this hack. The test forums is located here, and the news page is located here. You can use the test forums as an unregistered user; I have set up the unregistered usergroup to have Super Moderator powers, so you should be able to play around with the Edit Thread admin tool, etc.

I'm posting this in the Beta forums because I'd like for some other people to let me know it works OK for them. It works fine for me, on two boards; I originally wrote it and developed it for my regular board, which was heavily hacked to begin with. I then setup a clean, unhacked, totally stock board as a testing grounds, and recreated the hack, and again, it worked fine. I want to confirm that it works fine for at least one other person, but I'm also hoping that someone more experienced than myself can take a look at it to see if I've coded it the best way possible.

The other issue I hope to address here in Beta relates to how the text from news item threads is formatted to appear on the news page. Currently, this hack gets the entire contents of the first post of a thread, and it is run through the bbcode parser, so what you see on the news page is just like what you see in the thread itself, including smilies, all vB Code tags converted, etc. Also, the entire post is used; it is not run through any process that limits it to a certain number of characters. The reason I did not set up a character limit was mainly so that the bbcode parser would not get confused if a closing tag was completely or partially cut out. I figured that since I included a permission system, that at least for me would limit the ability to make a thread a news item to Admins and Mods, I could teach my staff to keep news item threads short.

However, I have toyed with the idea (in my mind) of changing the hack so that if you check a box to make a thread a news item, when you submit the thread, instead of the thread being posted straight away, instead, first you are taken to another page with a textarea containing the contents of the post. In this second textarea, which contains what you just typed in the normal newthread screen, you can edit or change what you typed, and what you do here would get stored in an additional field added to the thread table, and this is what would get shown on the news page. That way, you could start a thread, put an entire news article in it or whatever, mark it to be a news item, submit it, then pare down the contents of the post to just a little blurb suitable for a news item display on the news page, while the original bit you typed gets saved as a post and shown in the thread as normal. (Hope that makes sense.) If I hear enough of a demand for something like this, or get any other ideas, I may consider it. The downside to this is it becomes a little more complicated to post a news item thread.

OK, so install it or play with the demo, and let me know if it's ready for a full release!

Edit on Jan. 1, 2002: This hack has been updated to Version 2, with new features as discussed throughout this thread. Please go to this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...281#post210281

[JJR512]

Really? It worked fine for me:



Which thread did you reply to?

[floleb7]

yes when i add my post there isn't any comments but now i see 1 comment so strange

[JJR512]

Just to let you all know, I am still working on the next version of this. I would say I'm about 2/3rds done.

In the meantime, anyone that has already installed the existing version, you can delete the field "summary" from the thread table. It isn't used at all, and I don't know how that part got in there!

[sianews]

Any news on the next release?

[bigmattyh]

[QUOTE]In the meantime, anyone that has already installed the existing version, you can delete the field "summary" from the thread table.

[JJR512]

There is no summary feature. It's not part of the existing hack or the planned update to the hack; it was just one way I thought I was going to do something, then I decided to do it a different way, and forgot to take it out of the instructions.

[Dockaych]

I installed this hack, and I really like it. However, I have encountered some problems.

1. It seems to include the Admin forums on the sidebar. I would like to have some control as to elliminated certain forums from the latest posts.

2. The script right now seems to ignore my custom icons completely. Is there way to make these work?

3. I would really like an option to 'cut off' my news articles. Is there any way we could include a [snip] tag on the article and that would cut off the article right there (manually, rather than after X paragraphs).

[JJR512]

1. I'll be sure to fix it so it excludes forums a user does not have permission to view in the next release. (Does it do that with the main news, too?)

2. Are your custom post icons named the same way as the standard icons? In other words, with the file name being "iconx", where x is a number?

3. The next release will include a way to let you change what shows up in the news page, so that it does not have to be a direct copy of the thread's first post. So if you wanted to post an entire article to start the thread, but trim it down to the first two or three paragraphs for the news, you could do that, or if you put your articles in quote tags for threads but don't want the quote tags for the news, you could do that. Basically, when you submit a thread that you've checked to be a news item, you will be taken to a new form with a copy of the thread's first post (what you just typed out), where you can make separate edits to the message body to control what appears on the news page.

[sianews]

There will be an option to not have the summary - just the headline - show up, right?

And will the URL field be in the next release?

[sianews]

Any update? I'm a little anxious in case you can't tell .