Custom news feed

[Spinball]

Hi,
with limited (virtually no) hacking abilities I managed to integrate a news feed into my forums e.g.
http://www.avforums.com/forums/forum...?s=&forumid=37
and
http://www.avforums.com/forums/forum...?s=&forumid=80

The news comes from my own news database and is saved as static HTML automatically when new news items are added by my news writers.
This HTML file is then included above the forum display template using an addition to an advert banner hack.
The point is that it doesn't use the phpinclude template which I found very problematic.It'll be a piece of cake for the hacking veterans, but for newbies like me, if anyone is interested in how I did it, I'll list the code.

[Spinball]

Ok well first you have to have the news item in a static HTML format somewhere. Mine is on a different server altogether and is created with the same style as the forum.

The hack to vBulletin is based on an advert banner hack I got from here as discussed at:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=44204

An example of my banner displaying template:
-----------------------------------
<TABLE WIDTH="468" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="CENTER" BORDERCOLOR="#000000"><TR><TD><A HREF="http://www.avforums.com/perl_script_which_opens_advertisers site.pl" TARGET="_blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.avforums.com/advertisers_banner_graphic.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="60" BORDER="0" ALT="MovieTyme for import DVDs"></A></TD></TR></TABLE>
----------------------------------------------------
The banner sits in the middle of the screen and when clicked fires off a perl script which just redirects people to the advertiser's site. I use this so I can count the number of clicks of the banner.

The forum display template has this in it:
----------------------------------------------
</table><br>
$mycustombanner
$forumdisplay[forumslist]
-------------------------------------
which displays the banner at the top of the thread list.
And then a simple hack of forumdisplay.php as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------------
if ($forumid==37) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum37advert')."\";");
$mycustombanner .= "<P></P>" . file_get_contents("http://www.url_of_your_news_headlines_static.html");
} elseif ($forumid==72) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum72advert')."\";");
} elseif ($forumid==80) {
$mycustombanner = file_get_contents("http://www.url_of_different_news_headlines_static.html") . "<P></P>";
} elseif ($forumid==82) {
if (mt_rand(1,2) == 1) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum82nexnix')."\";");
} else {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum82avsales')."\";");
}
}
eval("dooutput(\"".gettemplate('forumdisplay')."\" );");
------------------------------------------------------------------
The examples above display a banner and then news headlines for forum 37, a banner only for forum 72, news headlines only for forum 80 and a random banner from a pool of 2 banners for forum 82.


Hope this is useful to somebody.

[Roody]

I would be interested in seeing the code.