UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? can content islands display posts (not titles)

i currently have my boards set up to display the 4 most recent posts atop the main forum page.

with that, you get the poster's name, the reply number, and the thread name (complete with embedded link to the most recent post).

is it at all possible, via CIs, to display the actual post? i.e; the content?

in a new homepage design, i'm hoping to display the actual text of the 4 or 5 most recent posts. poster name, reply number... even thread name aren't important.

i'm solely interested in retrieving the actual post content. ....and, maybe, the date/time stamp that accompanies the post content.

No, not out of the box. I'm sure it can be hacked in though.

heya ubg

hmm... what'll that involve editing? the actual xml file? and duzzis sound overly and/or nastily complex?

crap! this whole ordeal might be more complex than i'm thinking.

lemme esplain in better detail:

on the homepage of my new site, i'd like to have a lil text box that shows the 4 or 5 most recent posts from on particular forum on my message boards.

i've just finally figured out how to export the ubb content into xml so that flash can read and display the information.

however, by doing that, i've discovered that its not exporting what i want! (doh!)

what i want is the text of the 4 or 5 most recent posts -- or even just the 1 most recent post. and, with each post, i'd like to have the date / time stamp.

notthin else -- no poster name, no forum name, no post number, etc -- it doesn't even need a link! (i can add that myself)

I'm really the wrong person to ask. I haven't spent anytime looking at the code in a while. But you wouldn't want edit the xml as it'll just be replaced the next time someone posts. The hack will have to be done in the bits that produce the xml. I don't know where that is.

While it isn't too difficult to make CIs extract post contents, it has the potential to create a pretty nasty load, as topic files would need to get opened every time the CI needs to get rebuilt.

much thanks with the quick responses, guys

hmm... a nasty load even if just limited to one most-recent post? (within one forum?)

if its just that one post-content loading ... what kinda load am i lookin at here? assuming most of the posts would be no larger than my post that started this thread

(all of the posts would be coming from my weblog forum, in which only i can post, and there's, on average, 3-4 new posts a day in the entire forum).

Potential, not certainty. If it's just one forum, it won't be TOO bad.

The act itself isn't too hard... open a handful of files and do things with them. But, remember that CIs are almost always updated only during moderate load operations - posting, editing, etc. The load would be tacked on to those processes, which might be the proberbial straw that breaks the camel's back.

When we do this in the official code, excerpts from recent posts are going to be stored along the recentmeta files, which will allow for quick retrieval. (This was a proposed feature for 6.7, but it was cut after there was some concern about release dates and timing. While UBB.classic is my main project, I am involved in a handful of other high importance projects internally. )

hmm... lemme see if i got this right...

so, even tho this particular CI isn't actually part of the message board itself (i.e; not visible on any part of the forum), it'll potentially slow down the boards because they're what creates/updates the CI in the first place (?)

similarly, my homepage's flash movie text will only be updated when something on my message boards is updated through one of the moderate load operations you mentioned (?)

if thats the case... i'd say its, at least, worth the chance. i don't mind riding this camel

of course, the next step would just be figuring out how, which is more of a my back kinda thing (as the camel laughs )

that is, of course, unless you wanna gimme a ride? ... mebbe help pay for gas?

alright, how 'bout someone riding shotgun?

how, exactly, does one create a CI?

do i just make a folder in the ubb/contentislands/ area? ... pop in some custom html, css, and/or xml files?

In 6.5 Content Islands are created from with in the control panel under Other Features IIRC. It creates all the files necessary.

for the standard CI's, sure. but the one i'm looking for can't be made via that process (as far as i know)

You'll have to edit public_ci_posts.pl I think... It might be worth taking a look at the TAT code I guess, since that provides snippets of posts...

well, i looked the public_ci_posts.pl file over a bit last night. there's, uh... lotsa un-rob-friendly code in there that wasn't too promising

would this at all involve the $post_body tags in public_topic_page, as well? (is that the TAT stuff?)

I am very interested in this as well for my home page.
Anybody have any feedback on Drkknight's last post?
Thanks in advance! Ubbdev hasn't failed me yet!

hmm... what about how the posts are being displayed on the main page of ubbdev (the site, not the forums). any clues in there mebbe?

i'm stumped

any luck on yer end, reamere?

i just keep getting more lost.