Logician NEWS: Drag Any Message to Your Main Page

This is a news script which will drag vb forum messages from your vb db to your non-vb main page/news page. There are a lot of good news script around but I needed a highly customizable main page news script with some special features and wrote it myself. I'm using it in my site's main page for a long time, but I was just too lazy to write installation/help documents to share it here, sorry!

FEATURES:

* This script simply pulls forum messages which you marked as "news" from your vb database and post them in your non-vbulletin (main/other) page.
* You can mark messages as "NEWS" in any forum you want (including private forums). You dont need to restrict your news to a specific forum.
* You can drag any message to your main page, regardless of its date. So news is NOT supposed to be the most recent messages in your board.
* You do NOT have to carry the whole message to your main page as news. You can import it all or simply take some part of it. So eg. you can drag a message's the first paragraph to your news page and link the thread for "Read More".
* Moreover you can insert invisible custom NEWS text which will be dragged to your main page to your board messages, but not shown in the original forum thread. So your original thread message and news text on your main page can be different than eachother.
* You can have sticky news in your main page (even if they are not sticky in your forum).
* News does NOT need to be the first message in the thread. You can tag any reply message as news and pull it to your main page either.
* Script parses ALL of your message icons/smilies (including your custom add-ons) and some of the important vBCode like: [url] [email] [img] [b] [i] [u]
* You can specify which members may post news.
* You can form your News' title seperately, apart from of the original thread/message title.
* You can set maximum number of news shown in your main page.
* You can set maximum number of characters that all shown news should not exceed. Some messages can be long and some can be short and if you set a character limit, the script will automatically compile enough news from your database to fit your web page's relevant part according to the limit you set.
* You can enable/disable:
News Poster Name
News Date
News Read Number
News 'Send to a Friend' Link
Comment number/Add comment button/Last commenter
Will viewing news increase the original thread's view count or not
News is sticky or not
for ALL your news INDIVIDUALLY.
* All news tags are invisible in the original thread. So forum readers do not notice any difference when you tag a message as news.
* Dragging a message to your main page as news is as simple as inserting a hidden [news]Title of My News[/news] tag to your forum message.

Well, these features are what I needed in my news script, so it should suffice to you too!

It's an easy to install script and will work with ALL vbulletin versions because it's an add-on, not a hack. I can give support as much as I have time, but please ask here, not via email or PM.

If you use the script, please click INSTALL. If you post the URL of your news page after installation, you can help other users see the script in action in different pages and in custom designs, thank you!

Logician

[zonegray]

Yup, it seems to work.

I just added this right below the global.php include in my copy of show.php:

include("./newsconfig.php");
$newsoutput=news();

And then inserted $newsoutput into a template. Obviously, the news adds extra overhead, so it seems wise to use a "clean" copy of show.php for most templates, and only use the modified copy for pages that need to include the news. I suppose you could include the news into just about any page this way, if there were a reason to.

Whee, this is going to work out great. Thanks for the great add-on.... it works exactly the way we need it to.

[Brew]

I am wondering if you know this hack to work with PostNuke or other CMS as a block?

Thank you,

Brew

[TheJANG]

A+! This is a truly A+ add-on/hack and it's already saving me time. I've done a little modifying and inserted it in an iframe on my site at http://www.UltimateRC.com . I've got three more sites lined up & ready to use it!

Thank you VERY much for the great work. This looks like the simplest, easiest-to-use, most configurable news-from-vB-on-a-non-vB-page setup around.

*clicks INSTALL*

[zonegray]

hmmm... the timestamp (??NEWSDATE??) seems to be coming up an hour earlier than the actual post. It reads 12:21 pm on the front page, and 1:21 pm in vBulletin. Can I fix it?

Looks like it has something to do with $gelentarih, but my Turkish is even worse than my PHP

[Logician]

Originally posted by zonegray
hmmm... the timestamp (??NEWSDATE??) seems to be coming up an hour earlier than the actual post. It reads 12:21 pm on the front page, and 1:21 pm in vBulletin. Can I fix it?
Looks like it has something to do with $gelentarih, but my Turkish is even worse than my PHP

:classic:

it's in phpheader.php:

PHP Code:

## Time difference between the time zone post you want for your news and your server(vbulletin) time. 
## Set is as a positive or negative number such as -3, +5 etc.
$timeset=0; 


[Sebastian]

Logician, does this have an archive news page? basically I am looking for something like this but also a way to get old news from a forum and put them on a different page, sorted by month the news was posted. What happens when there are 30 articles posted? does it archive them?

[Logician]

Originally posted by Sebastian
Logician, does this have an archive news page? basically I am looking for something like this but also a way to get old news from a forum and put them on a different page, sorted by month the news was posted. What happens when there are 30 articles posted? does it archive them?

Sebastian this hack does not have an archive feature.. It just pulls the tagged posts to your non-vb page and removes their "news status" when they expired according to your configuration. So it does not archieve old posts..

[GTGT]

I have 250 000 posts and it's too slow for me

But seem to be workign good but slow

How much faster will the advance hack improve it?

I am hesitant to use it since it changes the database. Can the changes be resetted?

www.bmwm5.com

[Logician]

Originally posted by GTGT
How much faster will the advance hack improve it?

I am hesitant to use it since it changes the database.

Advanced installation will cure the slowness dramatically. As a matter of fact it is for large databases like yours so dont hesitate to use it. Although my board is small, even I use the hack with advanced installation.

If you want to revert back your db to original values, you can do it via PhpMyadmin easily. The advanced installation adds a new field (news) to "post" table and adds an "index" to that field so that searching will be fast, that's it. If you want to remove it later, all you need to do is to delete this field from your table. It's no big deal, but you should always backup your database before every altering step anyway..This is a general rule..

[GTGT]

Thanks for the answer. I am hesitant to change my database though. Hmmw, what eould you think of this hack:

#### Subject Preview by DR2000 ####
I looked at all other hack avaliable for this, and all of them are trying to do too much by editing your database structure, and modifying the way data is inserted. Why overcomplicate things, when all data is already there, and it only needs to be extracted...
#### DEMO ####
To see this hack in action take a look at http://forum.4adrive.com
#### FEATURES ####
- Shows the subject of the last active post on the front page
- Shows the icon of the last active post on the front page
- No need to alter database, and risk to screwing something up
- Only one file to change
- If the subject was very long, shows trunkated version of it, and replaces the rest with '...', preventing your main page layout from being screwed up.
#### #### ####
Nov 14, 2001
#### #### ####


Maybe it doesn't worh for vbulletin 2.2.9?