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 (or other board pages), not inside thread view. So visitors will read them without clicking on them.
• The Hack's announcements are not static: ie. they can be powerfully programmed to change themselves according to many conditions.

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:

2. user is X
3. user's usergroup is Y
4. his profile field Z is X
5. user has X posts or has more than Y posts but less than Z posts
6. his last visit time was X days ago
7. 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
8. User is invisible/visible
9. user is using style A
10. his cookies are on
11. his timeset is set to A
12. etc..

The conditionals even allows you to design "Board Tips" ever changing according to user's seniority or post number. See how-to document for conditional usage and more info..

It's tested in both v.2.2.6 and v.2.2.7 but it should work with any versions > 2.0.3. (v.2.2.8 or later Users READ HERE!) I'm using it in my own board and a friend's board for more than a month and found it quite stable and released it. Although not likely, if you found any bugs, holler and I'll fix it..

Here is a Screenshot from a "general announcement".
Here is a Screenshot of announcement which is addressed to a certain user.

Some Features:

• It's Admin CP integrated (Screenshot)
• Smiley and BBCode in announcements are parsed
• 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.

If you have problems displaying HTML/smilie/bbcode in your announcements, make this tiny change in hack code

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

Logician \\=^))

[Logician]

Originally posted by ptbyjason
Any reason why I would be getting the following error at the top of my forum?
[/PHP]

Delete your announcement box and try again. It is very likely because you set an a invalid /wrong sytnaxed conditional.. If it so, correct your conditional..

If your problem continiues after deleting your announcement box, I would say it's not related to this hack, but to make sure delete the hack code you added to global.php. This is very close to uninstall and if the hack is your problem, it will be solved in this step.

[ptbyjason]

I am pretty sure it is the hack. Whenever I go back and replace the original php files, and make no other changes, the error is gone from the board. I can use just a text message and get the error not only on my board but also in the admin panel. Any thing I can do to make the hack work without the error? I really like this one.

[Logician]

Originally posted by ptbyjason
I am pretty sure it is the hack. Whenever I go back and replace the original php files, and make no other changes, the error is gone from the board. I can use just a text message and get the error not only on my board but also in the admin panel. Any thing I can do to make the hack work without the error? I really like this one.

1- Do you get any errors when you clear announcement box? If no, what announcement have you inserted?
2- Do you get any errors when you delete the hack code from global.php? (only from global.php!)
3- What's your vb version?

[ptbyjason]

Originally posted by Logician

1- Do you get any errors when you clear announcement box? If no, what announcement have you inserted?
2- Do you get any errors when you delete the hack code from global.php? (only from global.php!)
3- What's your vb version?

1. Yes, still get them.
2. I cannot find the code to delete in global.php
3. I am running 2.2.6

Something else I just noticed. When I have the 3 modified php files uploaded, the avatars do not appear in the postbit. Does that give a hint to the problem at all?


Logician, thank you for taking the time to help me with my problem.

[Logician]

Originally posted by ptbyjason
Something else I just noticed. When I have the 3 modified php files uploaded, the avatars do not appear in the postbit. Does that give a hint to the problem at all?

Frankly, I strongly believe that your problem is not related to this hack (unless it's clashing with another hack) because a problem in postbit (showthread.php) seems to have nothing to do with this hack. When you load your postbit you are dealing with showthread.php and its not even modified. Your uploading the old files correcting your problem makes me thing if you applied the hack correctly or not. Please double check this. If you cant figure out the problem and still want to use the hack, I can try to trace it if you can give me FTP access to your site and access to Admin CP.

[geniuscrew]

Nice hack but i'm getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: dynamic_a() in /home/******/public_html/forum/index.php on line 13

[Logician]

Originally posted by geniuscrew
Nice hack but i'm getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: dynamic_a() in /home/******/public_html/forum/index.php on line 13

geniuscrew make sure you applied installation STEP 2 correctly. You should insert the code in that step to "admin/functions.php" (that is "functions.php" in the "admin" dir), NOT "adminfunctions.php".

[LawnDawg]

Hmm, ok, I followed all the instructions properly.. cept nothing's showing up on my forum home..

Help please =\

[Logician]

Originally posted by LawnDawg
Hmm, ok, I followed all the instructions properly.. cept nothing's showing up on my forum home..

Help please =\

Have you gone to VB Settings and choose "SAVE CHANGES" after the installation? If yes, make sure:
1- you have created the template ""dfh_announcement" in all your template sets.. Also make sure the template content is correct..
2- You applied the hack code correctly to index.php and functions.php.
3- You put "$dfh_announcement" to the correct place in forumhome template (once again put inside all templates set's forum home, if you have more than 1)

[LawnDawg]

Yeesh, that was odd.

I changed the announcement right after I installed it.

Didn't work. I changed it again just now, & it works.

Thx Logi.

[edit]Is there any way I could add this into my "header" template? does seem to work.. [/edit]