vBComments: Coranto News Integration

Hi all, before going into detail here, I would just like to thank Lawrence Williams, the developer of this hack/add-on for his permission to repost this here.

He is not an avid user of vBulletin, and created this add-on as a special request. Since I knew that it could be useful to the vb.org community, I asked his permission to post it here.


With that said, a bit of an introduction. Coranto is the continued evolution of a perl news script called NewsPro. It's an incredible news updating script that is used on many sites. Recently, the old developer of Coranto has stepped down from the palte, and the community of users has continued it's development in his absence. you can find the NEW homepage for Coranto, as well as downloading the program and it's Add-Ons, both user-made and community-contributed here.

Coranto itself only requires a server with Perl. This add-on, vBComments, requires the server to have the DBI Perl modules installed with the mySQL DBD package.

vBComments allows you to have your news items posted both into Coranto's text database (or mySQL database, if you use CorantoSQL, another community Add-On) for publish to your front page news, and to a specified forum within your vBulletin Database.

You can choose which vBulletin User the post should appear as in vBulletin, and which forum to use (NOTE: html code MUST be enabled for the specific forum for the news post to appear correctly. You may be able to work around this with a little bit of creative style template use within Coranto and a small amount of Perl knowledge. When I figure it out I will make sure this gets updated in both this thread and in the vBComments distributable.).

It then allows you to have a [Comments] link appear on your news post on the non-vB front page of your site, linking you to the thread. It also allows you to see how many comments have been made, but only if you use the dynamic news include (viewnews.cgi) for inclusion onto your home page (otherwise it would only show how many comments were in the thread the last time the news was updated).

This addition requires NO programming knowledge, and NO changes to your vBulletin installation. There are no changes necessary to Coranto, thanks to it's unique HOOKED Add-On system (which I would LOVE to see in a future version of vBulletin).


As an added note, it is recommended that you create a forum specifically for News Discussion on your vBulletin, and add the usernames of your news updaters to a custom user group that has permission to Start New Topics there, leaving other users with only the ability to reply to threads.

Hack version: 2.03b
vBulletin version DOESN'T MATTER, as long as it's 2.0+
Coranto version required: 4.x (build 29+)

[DraX]

That'd be quite the impressive hack indeed, then... maybe making some requests oer on the Coranto forums would get Lawrence thinking about it ;-)

[sweetmercifulcr]

I get an internal server error when trying to open cra_vbulletin.pl. It's in my cgi-bin, with my coranto files. It's also chmod'd to 755 (I can't do 777 in the cgi-bin). I'm assuming that I run cra_vbulletin.pl to set the settings, right? The instructions aren't clear on that. Please help.

[DraX]

Sorry, been out of touch for a while.

Just run Coranto, and enable the add-on from the Add-on management section of the Administration page.

[kaotic]

This is amazing! I shall install it now.

[blacknight]

I've been trying to get this working for the last couple of hours and am totally frustrated :-(
Connecting to MySql = no problem
However I am not getting either a comments field or anything else on the site's main page.
The new thread is created on the board - but it is empty...

[Dark_Angel2]

This is a great little hack. I've installed it and it's working fine.

I'm wondering if anyone can make an addition to this though? What I want is to use the script as it is but have the comments appear in the news item rather than simply having a link to the thread. Anyone know how? Thanks.

[Jujimufu]

05-04-03 at 08:46 PM blacknight said this in Post #15
I've been trying to get this working for the last couple of hours and am totally frustrated :-(
Connecting to MySql = no problem
However I am not getting either a comments field or anything else on the site's main page.
The new thread is created on the board - but it is empty...

I'm having the "EXACT" same problem as this guy?

[KW802]

Any chance that this hack will be updated for VB3?

[ixian]

Lawrence is still very active in the Coranto hacking community, so I would say yes.

Even if he doesn't, I plan on modifying it myself once the first RC comes out (I'm not running VB3 yet). The changes won't be too major.

If Lawrence doesn't update by the time the final comes out then I'll just release mine as long as he's cool with that.

[DraX]

I've been working on a CMS package myself and have to update multiple sites that are running on Coranto over to this new system (the CMS is an add-on to vBulletin)... I'm nearly complete with the core functions and am slowly porting my code over from 2.x to 3.0 (I started the project on vB 2.2.9)

I'm sure that Lawrence will be making a 3.0 update for his Coranto integration, as ixian said.

Additionally, because of my own necessities I'll be making an importer that imports posts from CorantoSQL (probably not from default Coranto) into the news database of my CMS (it uses a separate table for news/articles/etc, rather than having them linked to the forums directly), along with associating Coranto usernames with their respective vBulletin accounts.