vB Drupal addon - vbList

Note: This is an addon module for vB Drupal: Community Plumbing

This module will allow you to list the latest X threads, including the first
post from specified forums within Drupal. It was intended as a "news" modules
that uses a forum as source. It is not meant for content management.

I wrote it to replace "node" as default front page module.

A somewhat live demo: http://el-muerte.student.utwente.nl/lba/

Entries will be display as usual nodes of type 'vblist'. Therefor modifying the durpal_node template will also have an effect on this. Note, even though it will the entries as nodes it doesn't mean all node functionality works. For example you might want to adjust your theme code to also construct "$submitted" field for this node, since this isn't configurable through the administer page.
The following fields will be set on a 'vblist' node:

type: always 'vblist'
created: UNIX timestamp of the thread creation
changed: UNIX timestamp of the last reply
title: the title of the thread
body: the body of the first post in the thread
uid: the UID of the poster
name: the name of the thread poster
sticky: true if it's a sticky thread
threadid: the ID of the thread
links: the array contains a link to the forum thread


Compatibility: This module currently only works with vBulletin 3.5 (only tested on 3.5.2)

[El_Muerte]

Changes since v0.1:

• [new] forum permission can be respected, settable via the settings page
• [new] rendered pages can be cached, this will reduce SQL queries and time needed to parse the vB code
• [fixed] unicode shouldn't cause any issues anymore

Changes since v0.2:

• [added] permission category for viewing the page: "access forum"
• [fixed] smilies and relative links are properly prefixed
• [added] new setting: "Use forum title" to use the forum title instead of the configured title
• [added] support for subpages: "vblist/1,2,3", this must be enabled first. It's adviced to enable forums titles and forum permissions when using this.

Changes since v0.3

• [fixed] forgot to convert the body text to UTF8
• [fixed] attach vbcode is now correctly handled
• [added] more node fields, listed above, that can be used in the drupal theme

[Snake]

Man I'm definitely going to use this!

[TheComputerGuy]

Originally Posted by Aftermath

Man I'm definitely going to use this!

I installed it on a friends site
http://www.hybridtalk.com

If you need a live demo (another one)

[tamarian]

Well done :up:

One minor issue, you need to declare $stylevar as global in vblist_page to get the utf conversion right, or some characters may look funny.

[Zhen-Xjell]

I second the well done.

[dodgechargerfan]

Excellent! This is what I have been trying to get vBDrupal to do for me.

I still want to figure out how to format each entry a little nicer. I'm lost.

One problem that I have though, is that the path for smilies in the original post is incorrect.

They would normally have a path like www.domaim.com/forums/images/smilies/smiley.gif

but when vblist brings it up, the path changes to www.domaim.com/portal/images/smilies/smiley.gif

I can see what the problem is, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to where I should make the change to fix it.

Any help?


Thanks again for a great piece of coding.

[El_Muerte]

Originally Posted by dodgechargerfan

Excellent! This is what I have been trying to get vBDrupal to do for me.

I still want to figure out how to format each entry a little nicer. I'm lost.

There's a vbulletin template called drupal_node that is used for the display.
This plugin create a node and then simply calls the normal node display routine of drupal.
But I guess I could improve certain things.

Originally Posted by dodgechargerfan

One problem that I have though, is that the path for smilies in the original post is incorrect.

They would normally have a path like www.domaim.com/forums/images/smilies/smiley.gif

but when vblist brings it up, the path changes to www.domaim.com/portal/images/smilies/smiley.gif

good catch, didn't think of that.

[dodgechargerfan]

Originally Posted by El_Muerte

There's a vbulletin template called drupal_node that is used for the display.
This plugin create a node and then simply calls the normal node display routine of drupal.
But I guess I could improve certain things.

It's not so much a criticism, but more of a "How can I format it to the way I want it" type of question.

I think you just answered it for me. I have to go play with that template.
Thanks. I'll see what I can figure out. (remember, I'm a noob.)

About the smilies, I've looked into incorporating a call to global.php, but that just didn't fly at all. I got sql access errors.
I tried combining in vBExternals and that didn't work either.

I sort of understand what needs to be done to get them working, but I have no idea how to do it elegantly - if at all.

Anyway, thanks again for this add on. It's exactly what I was looking for and I think it's great.

[El_Muerte]

I have a fix for the smilies, well, sort of, it's an ugly regex fix, there are a couple of other things I want to change before releasing a new version.