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!

[Frapegliko]

is there any way to view German and Greek Charakters?

[libertylounge]

Working great on 3.6 here

edit: I take that back...

[thenetbox]

Hello

Is it possible, with some template changes, to get multiple feed results on one page? Example. Currently you click on feed1 and you get feed1 results, then you click on feed2 and you get feed2 results.

Is it possible to have a page with feed1 in one table and feed2 in another and so on?

Thanks

edit: oops the $myfeeds thing. got it

Do you know how to have a "Talk about it" button at the end of each headline in the summary view? Which template would I need to edit? thanks

[Mysticales]

Question, I wanna use this on my forums to show our sites news. However, I only want it to display 3 summary items. (Which thats no problem)

HOWEVER, I only want it to display like a partial news of the article. Like if I have it set to show 3 news articles that were posted, I only want the summery of each article to only show maybe 200 chars. (Kinda like the Maximum length thing)

However.. if I do that... it doesnt seem to work fully.... It seems to apply the maximum length thing to all 3 articles as if it was part of one limit.

I want it where I can show the latest 3 article news posted. Then a short summary of whats included in each article, then it would cut the "full" news out and say [More] which would link it to the full article.

Right now, if I set the Maximum length it seems to give me the [More] and cut off the article, however.. its applying it wrong it seems.. as the 1 article shows fine, but 2nd one would be even less.. and 3rd one would have nothing to show as a preview of the news at all.

If im making sense, is there a idea for this? I just want to show a preview of the news article posted, have the 3 latest articles shown a summary of. Then it would just in that summary preview link to the main full article, can this be done?

[libertylounge]

I'm having problems...

I'm getting these errors when it tries to run..

[Fri Aug 18 01:51:04 2006] [error] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required './includes/class_abouttoday.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/proc') in /home/ll/public_html/forums/includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php on line 23
[Fri Aug 18 00:05:33 2006] [error] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required './includes/class_abouttoday.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/proc') in /home/ll/public_html/forums/includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php on line 23

And it's not posting every 45 minutes like it should, however, if I run it manually, it works fine

[CyberRanger]

Originally Posted by libertylounge

I'm having problems...

I'm getting these errors when it tries to run..

[Fri Aug 18 01:51:04 2006] [error] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required './includes/class_abouttoday.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/proc') in /home/ll/public_html/forums/includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php on line 23
[Fri Aug 18 00:05:33 2006] [error] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required './includes/class_abouttoday.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/proc') in /home/ll/public_html/forums/includes/cron/cron_abouttoday.php on line 23

And it's not posting every 45 minutes like it should, however, if I run it manually, it works fine

Make sure you have class_abouttoday.php and cron_abouttoday.php loaded in the folders where they should be.

[libertylounge]

They're there.. and chmod'd 0644

I'm not sure why I'd be able to run it manually and have it work, but the cron wont?

I think I'm going to try a complete uninstall and then reinstall it..

[Mysticales]

No one knows how to just have the shown article be good formatted preview section of the news with it then saying MORE to link to the orig feed?

[Maagic]

Any way to get the feeds to go horizontally instead of one long column on the left? I got a bunch of wasted space here

http://www.so-there.net/uploader/fil...todayspace.JPG

[lexx27]

I have a problem with greek (utf-8). Is this a known problem?