Portal Software - Last X Blogs as cached front page 1.1.2

Last X Blog Posts as Home Page (Or any page)

This mod simply produces a cached page with the last 5(or however any you want) blogs posted at your site. It's ideal if you have a forum at www.yourdomain.com/forum and want a simple blog front page at www.yourdomain.com

It supports showing avatar only IF they are held within the filesystem. I recommend you change this if you want to use this mod. In fact, I recommend using the filesystem for all images regardless of whether you use this mod or not.

Features:
*Last 5 Blogs
*Smilies/Images and all bbcode
*Avatars
*Tags
*Categories
*AME 2.5 - Media Embedding for posts, sigs, vm's, groups and blogs fully supported
*Three queries! (Per hour if you want!)
*No file or db changes
*Digg Proof
*Free!


To Install:

1. First create a writeable directory for the cache file with appropriate permissions (usually chmod the directory to 777)
2. Open index2.php [attached]

Edit the following:

$numblogs=5; //NUMBER OF BLOGS SHOWN
$cachetime=60; //HOW LONG (IN SECONDS) BETWEEN CALLS TO THE DATABASE TO CHECK FOR UPDATED CONTENT

$forumpath = '/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs/forum'; //no trailing slashes!
$cachepath = '/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/cache';// no trailing slashes and writable!
These are the paths on your server NOT the web addresses.

Next edit:
$wwwavatarpath = '/forum/customavatars'; //no trailing slashes
$wwwforumpath = '/forum'; //no trailing slashes

These are relative paths so if your forums are at www.mydomain.com/forums then $wwwforumpath would be '/forums'

3. Upload index.php to your domain (www.yourdomain.com) and style.css to (yourdomain.com/styles)

4. Go to www.yourdomain.com in any browser and marvel at the glory of your new front page blogs

Demo:
http://www.rletc.com/index2.php

Next Steps:
Here's one I've added a header to
http://www.rletc.com/index_rletc.php

Feel free to mess around with the css to achieve whatever look you want. It's also not a problem renaming index2.php to blogfront.php or index.php if you want to retain an existing php file.

Have Fun!

Note: I plan to give minimal support but am available for custom solutions.

AFAIK this will work with any vbblog that supports tags even if it's running on 3.7.x

Update History:
Last5blogs.zip - 1st beta
last_x_blogs-1.1.zip : Added category support, minor fixes, added vb prefixes to tag queries, number of blogs and cachetime as variables.
last_x.blogs-1.2.zip : Fixed css, repackaged zip (index called index2.php to avoid over writing)

[cad2go]

*reserved for updates/answers*

[Rene Kriest]

Screenshots pls! We are visualz!

[KevinL]

Originally Posted by Rene Kriest

Screenshots pls! We are visualz!

There are 2 demos provided...

[Tarfandestan]

wow, its wonderful.
and if we have archive and category in site is better.

[cad2go]

Originally Posted by Tarfandestan

wow, its wonderful.
and if we have archive and category in site is better.

I'll have a look over the weekend. I don't use categories at the moment and if it's going to take another query to grab then it might be optional.

What would you like to see for archive? Why not just link to it?

[Twilkey]

I made a whole CMS that uses the blog system. I also made a vbadvanced module that uses the blog system like the news module. But this is cool aswell.

[lebanon]

Just a note, as i was checking this out, since it uses direct mysql query it does not use Table Prefix , and in your case you have just added your own prefix "vb"
So in the query $tagsql="SELECT blog_tag ....
The vbblog should be renamed to whatever the user's table prefix is, or include vb globals and use table_prefix .
regards

[asj]

Warning: chdir(): No such file or directory (errno 2) in c:\appserv\www\forum\index3.php on line 18

the problem of code :line 18

[cad2go]

Originally Posted by asj

Warning: chdir(): No such file or directory (errno 2) in c:\appserv\www\forum\index3.php on line 18

the problem of code :line 18

What do you have filled in for $forumpath? See below or above for instructions.

$forumpath = '/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs/forum'; //no trailing slashes!
$cachepath = '/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/cache/';//trailing slashes!

These are the paths on your server NOT the web addresses. Please note the second path has a trailing slash. I've included a file path.php that you can upload then open in your browser if you are unsure of your document paths.

Next edit:
$wwwavatarpath = '/forum/customavatars'; //no trailing slashes
$wwwforumpath = '/forum'; //no trailing slashes