UBB.Developers Forums UBB.classic V6 MultiHack Mods [6.0x] Introducing: UBBNews 2!

UBBNews 2.0:
This new version is a rewrite version with a major feature called 'news sessions', I'll discuss it later. Please note that this version is beta. So you may report any problems HERE ( don't email me ).

News Sessions:
Suppose you've got forums A,B,C,D and you want to display the forums A and B topics on a page and the forums C,D on another page and you want them to have compeletly different configuration settings ( max topics, characters limit , status , style template ). With News Sessions that's possible! You can create many news sessions as you like from the CP with different settings and different forums to grab topics from, and to get a specific news session's content via URL, you simpely do this: ubbnews.cgi?ns_id=NEWS_SESSION_ID . The id's are displayed in the control panel.

Practical Example:
We've created a news session from the CP with the forums A,B,C and the id was #2, we want to display the news on these forums so we simply make an SSI call with: ubbnews.cgi?ns_id=2

So, give it a try and report dozons of errors as usual
Download here .

Are there any demo boards?

Actually, you won't notice much differece between the user-end in this version and the pervious one. Major change is in the control panel.

the features sound good jb, something we need... will test it on a test board soon.

Sounds good Bond

One question, does it have upgrade instructions?

lookin good, sessions are just what i need

Nice job!!! Wow...

should be:

Awesome! You should update the zip with MasterMinds fix.. it doesnt work unless you change the t to T.. you should have an intstruction for upgrading and put a note there somewhere about the perl path for ubbnews.cgi..

Awsome JB, I have been waiting for a good news script like this.

incase anyone didn't catch what mastermind was talking about.. Look in ubbnews.cgi

You'll see the code correction he is talking about, it threw me for a loop at first.

[ June 20, 2001 10:59 PM: Message edited by: Djnemesis ]

bugs:

- when setting sessions, it looks for the vars files in the $vars_config{CGIPath}/ubbnews/vars_ubbnews..etc path - need to either add instructions to create the ubbnews folder in the cgi directory and upload the vars file to it, or change the scripts to look for the vars file in the cgi folder

- colors in the output should more closely pull from the ubb variables, what I mean is, if your background color is categorystripbackgroundcolor, then your text color should be categorystriptextcolor, or the titles can and will be invisible for a lotta sites

request: can you set a session to show headlines only?

reason: I'd like to have 1-2 announcements up top and then below a list of maybe the last 5-10 headlines... that way we can keep the latest news in front of the visitor without making them scroll for 4-5 pages.

possibly an option to show headlines below the announcements and how many would be tres cool

Nice work tho... a few bugs (to be expected in beta), but great possibilities..:)

Good job JB007...

I agree with Allen.

[ June 21, 2001 02:42 AM: Message edited by: LK ]

I'm thinking you could also use this like a much better version of the original Active Topics (UBB5). UBB6 version is pretty useless =).

So some sort of Headlines (Subject, date, poster, time / No. to show / Format) feature like AA states would help.

Well, I've updated the hack, here are the fixes, new features:

1. When I was developing the hack, I added the hashes to the use vars statement in cp.cgi but forgot to mention that in the installation file, this is now fixed.
2. Applied MM's fix.
3. Added 'View Headlines Only' feature, you can enable it from the news session addition/modification page. It will show only the forum,topic subject and the posting date of the topic ( like Ted's old news grabber ).
4. Minor changes in the templates to be more ubb-style compatible.
5. Minor change in the wordlets file, actually there was a typo in one of the hash keys.

To update, just perform the first new step of the cp.cgi instructions and reupload all files.

For those who want to upgrade from previous versions, you must uninstall the old hack, install the new one and create a new session that matches your old settings.

Allen, the instructions for creating the new directory are already there ( in the 'preparing for install' section ).

The first one kicked butt. This one is even better, News Sessions are great! No bugs from this side of the farm reported.

Very Very Nice Hack!

Sorry Bond, I missed that, was just reading the bottom..:)

On our front page I am using it in the upper right column as a "semi-replacement" for active.cgi. The topics aren't updating with the changes in the forums, any idea? It sounds like it is reading the cache when first built and not when the threads update in the forums. Also, when selecting more than one forum to read from, it pulls the latest howevermany topics you input from each forum, not that number (ex.: 4) from all the forums as a group... your news is gonna be huge if you select more than 1-2 topics and more than 1 forum to read them from

Another suggestion, the option to enclose the headlines in one $TBT / $TBB type table so that if we include the headlines below the main announcements, they aren't just left our there all alone I attempted to do this myself with varying results, most all of them very bad.

Other than that, excellent work Bond!

Thanks for your comments Allen, I'll look after the problem. And about enclosing the headlines in a table header/footer , this will require a bit of work, but I'll do it.

nice...:)

If it's too much work to enclose in a table, don't worry about it, I just snapped that I can do the same thing manually on the front page, then use the ssi inside of that. If it adds too much complexity, don't worry about the table thing.

Added a headline only forum and it says its not valid, and i added it manually -- white page.

Mastermind. Nice Quote .. I guess I am a console junkie

Well, I've added an option to apply the 'maximum topics to grab' amount on the whole forums as you wanted Allen. But remember that this amount must be dividable on the number of forums you specify ( example: Let's you that you've specified 2 forums, 4 topics max , then 4/2 = 2 topics for each forum ). So go and redownload and reupload files ( no changes in the installation instructions ).
MM, can you give me the exact error message?, because there are two possibilities for not valid forums

[ June 21, 2001 05:04 PM: Message edited by: JB007 ]

Hello, I know this is not the most proper place to ask, but I dont know wherelse to go.

I have installed this hack in my testboard, and have implemented this code on my testwebsite;


....but nothing happens, neither when I add a new topic to the configured forum.

Have I forgotten to activate some SSI stuff in my apache webserver, or what could the problem be?

Please delete this message, or move it to a proper place.
But I would appreciate som helping guidelines on this issue

I got this error too.
But... in CP, instead of specifying the forum NAME, specify the forum number, e.g. "Forum9" instead of "ThisForumName"

All right, does it works directly with out SSI? I mean if you call it directly from the browser: ubbnews.cgi?ns_id=2

If you have SSI enabled on the server and include that string in your .shtml file (ie index.shtml) or whatever you may have called it, it should display. If you have done this and it still doesn't work, try using this string instead.




That one could possibly work instead of the exec cgi one.

Nice hack. Can't wait to see it finished though.

Right now, it's too buggy.

1) Using "headline only mode", the names of the forums don't match up to where the links take you. The message topics are correct though.

2) Using "Show full topic", 1 out of every 5 or so topics cuts off to early, breaking the table and looking bad. And the topics don't link to anything, and the replies line is incomplete.

3) Using "headlines only" mode, the "Grab that number on the whole forums?" doesn't seem to make any difference, it grabs the amount of topics you specify from each forum.

4) The Limit Characters seems to start counting from the begining of the header. Can we get this to count from the beginning of the message body?

Thanks for the great hack.

This happens whenever i try and add a news session. I chmoded all the news files 777. What's wrong?

Make sure there is a ubbnews dir in your cgi dir.

It's there with chmod of 777. But i'm still getting those errors. Wierd. Am i the only one?

Yes this works perfectly well, but if not if i implement the code in a website. I have triad to put it in the General Display Settings "Forum Intro Text" box, just as a try, but when I call the forum summary site, all I just see is the actual codeline and not the content of it.
But as you say, browse directly to it works well....exerpt from a few bugs.

As soma0 says;
1) Using "headline only mode", the names of the forums don't match up to where the links take you. The message topics are correct though.

• I discovered this too. I found that if I have the Category View, and in Forum Settings have numbered to different forums as number 1, e.g. if both are forum number 1 in two different Categories, the newscript get confused. I solved this by giving each forum a unik number in the Forum Setting Page

2) Using "Show full topic", 1 out of every 5 or so topics cuts off to early, breaking the table and looking bad. And the topics don't link to anything, and the replies line is incomplete.

• Here I dont see any topic content at all, just the topic header, but the tables are perfect. The vertical size of the table increase if there are answers to the topic, but as I say, none of the content shows up.

4) The Limit Characters seems to start counting from the begining of the header. Can we get this to count from the beginning of the message body?

• As nothing of the topic/message content shows up, I am not abel to determine iif this works or not

I am working/testing on a machine not connected to the LAN/internet, my site isnt ready to upload yet, so i cant provide you with an url so you can have a look.

But I can make a bitmap file and upload it or send you, for you to take a look. Can I send by mail or upload somewhere?

This doesn work either, but a direct call like JB007 told me to test works well.

this might be outside the scope of this modification, but in the announcement/news forum, would it be possible to add a drop-down list of post icons that can be placed like we have our microphone on the front page? Something similar to the way slashcode is done... if my announcement is about someone new being added - an icon to go with that, if it's about the ubb sale - a dollar sign, if it's code related - maybe a computer, etc... would align itself in the upper right of the post...

I have the microphone hard-coded in, it would be nice to use a variety of icons to match the subject of the post...

In the control panel, you must specify the NUMBER only like '1 2 3 4' this will indicate forums 1,2,3 and 4, Specifying the order of the forums will return unmatched forums names, Since the script takes the actual forum number not the order.
The cp_ubbnews.cgi file was not updated on the last update, so re download now and re upload it. This should fix the problem of applying the 'maximum topics' amount on the whole forums.

I'm still getting those software errors. I check all the files for chmod and ascii. So what wrong?

i REALLY like this hack--i had problems too, but i dealt with them......include virtual worked, exec cgi didn't... the test session doesn't work, but i can add new ones so i dont care ...

i had the issue where the forum titles were displaying the order in which the forum was created, not it's forum number, and as a temporary work around i used the same fix from the thread about the last version of ubb news: I made the forum order in primary settings-> forum settings, the same as the forum number. caused a slight inconvenience, but it was worth it to be able to use this now.

other than that, i dig it.... i'm not done with this page, but you can check it out at:
http://www.fireseek.com/gm.shtml

Guys!!! The forum number appears next to each forum's name in the forums settings page!
I forgot to remove the test session entry from the configuration and since it does not have a configuration file .. it failed. So you've to remove it manually from the vars_ubbnews_sessions.cgi file.