An idea - but lacking knowledge!

I'm an idea person, and n00b coder - so I thought I'd run my idea past you all before I got started!

I'm making a hardware review website, and I am going to have each new review as a forum thread. I want each "review" to comprise of multiple pages - corrosponding to each post per "review" thread... I dont want the "reply" "rules box" etc... on that page, so I guess I'd have to rewrite the showthread.php file a little!

Any suggestions on a suitable approach?

[TECK]

create a new set of templates and modify them to suit your reviews look.

[Reeve of shinra]

check out firefly's hack about changing the first post appearance. You can mod that somewhat for the 'forums' your using as review sections.

[Ian Cunningham]

OK - I tried your idea nakkid (sorry Reeve of shinra )

I've customised the templates to look exactly how I wanted them, but all the posts in the thread are displayed on the one page... Is there any way to make each post in the thread on a new page? (Without effecting my normal forums with 20 per page?)

[TECK]

use this:

PHP Code:

<?php
error_reporting(7);

$templatesused = "home_reviews,home_mainpage";

chdir("/home/path/to/web/forum");
require("./global.php");

$reviews="1";
$reviewposts="3";

$newsql=$DB_site->query("SELECT * FROM thread WHERE forumid='$reviews' ORDER BY dateline DESC LIMIT $reviewposts");
while ($new=$DB_site->fetch_array($newsql)) {
  $newthreadid=$new[threadid];
  $newtitle=$new[title];

  $getnewsql=$DB_site->query_first("SELECT * FROM post WHERE threadid='$newthreadid' ORDER BY postid ASC LIMIT 1");
  $newtime=vbdate($timeformat,$new[dateline]);
  $newdate=vbdate($dateformat,$new[dateline]);
  $newpagetext=$new[pagetext];
  $newpagetext=bbcodeparse($newpagetext);

  eval("\$newthisweek .= \"".gettemplate('home_reviews')."\";");
}

eval("dooutput(\"".gettemplate('home_mainpage')."\");");
?>

this will call the first post only of a specific thread. the code is self explanatory.
NOTE: $reviews is the forum ID you want to pull the info from, and $reviewposts is the no. of posts you want to pull from.
in this way you can have a custom template to show where ever you want it in your website

you could also make the forum invisible so it will not show on the forums list. the script will still pull the info.

regards,
nakkid.

[Ian Cunningham]

I tried you idea, but I couldnt get it to work how I wanted...

What I have done now, is call the review from the main page with showthread.php?threadid=xx and use a new template on it that scraps all of the stuff like "reply" etc...

I had to set the main vB Options to only display 1 post per page to get it to work - it works great now (Thanks again ) BUT, when I view my main forum (just for normal posts), I get 1 post per page again, is there any way to set this to 15 per page, but only for my main forum?

If I can get this last bug sorted, I can upload my site