UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 6 V6 Modifications Forum Design Integration Integrating Board Menu & Front Page Hacks

Hi there,

For the last three years my site http://www.ssboards.com has been purely a message board, originally setup for players of an online game to congregate and discuss game related things.

Years on now we have moved away from this and very few people play the game any more. The board is now a General Board in which anything and everything is discussed, but the common theme is that most of our posters are online gamers, or gamers in general.

Over the years our board has grown from 10 users on an ezboard to almost 500 users on UBB.Threads (which we migrated to about a year ago). We have our own IRC room which is connected to the boards, a resident "boards bot" (DaBot) and even some development projects including an MORPG in Beta stages.

Recently I have been working on ripping all the ezboard archives (2 years worth). I have written a program to change the format and am just finalising it to add the entire archives in a new forum as posts as if they were posted on UBB.Threads from day one.

That bit of history may have been unneccesary but I hope it gives you an idea about what I am trying to do.

It has now become apparent that our community would greatly benefit from a front page, and with this in mind I am currently creating a front page which will primarily be news posts (gaming related mostly), some resident writers (some of the more eloquent members of our community) and a spotlight on the boards for the best current threads.

I am hoping to link the boards to the front page quite extensively. I am writing my own news scripts in PHP as I do not want to just use PHP Nuke or any of the other "pre-set" news sripts out there.

The writers are going to be able to upload their own writing/news (with size and other limitations) and each writer is going to have his own template (different icon, etc). I was hoping to link this to their login, or their display name whichever is easier.

I want to be able to add writers and setup their template from within the admin panel of the boards (hoping to have the admin panel of the boards and the front page to be the same admin panel).

The level of integration is where I am having the problems with this project, and this is what I need some help with...

Who's Online: I want the who's online screen on the boards to show if someone is online reading the front page and what they are reading.

Login/Logout: I want a board login to be used for the front page also.

Search: Rather than create a seperate search feature for the front page only, I was hoping to integrate this with the boards search feature, so that they can search the front page from within the boards as well as the forums, or just the front page if they choose to.

My Home:- The only part of my home I want to integrate is the stylesheets. I am using the same stylesheets for the front page as the board, and I was hoping that people's My Home preference would carry across to the front page.

I haven't done anything on the integration side yet, I am just working on the layout and design first.

I am posting this here to ask if anyone else has already done anything I have mentioned and if so how? Hoping to save myself quite some time by utilising existing scripts/hacks. Of course when it's all done anyone who helps would get credited, and of course anything new I make will be made available for all to use =)

Thanks,

~Sheallaidh

You'd probably benefit from Dave's IIP add on.

I display latest stories from my "Tavern" forum right on the front page using a modified ubbtnews file and the IIP add-on. Works very well.

Just a thought.

I did look at that, but there is a lot of other stuff I want to do, and a lot of stuff in it that I don't want. It's very nice though.

Dave expects a new version out very soon... and a "pro" version for sale sometime this year which will add even more stuff.... ala PostNuke.

So stay tuned.

So far everything you've listed is part of IIP. It's totally configurable with little modules (called pal boxes) you can turn stuff off that you don't want, and add your own pal boxes.... or download pal box addons that others (like myself) have written.
It's even set up that custom added pals can benefit from the speed of using IIPs caching ability.

Even if you want to customize it further.... you'd be best to start with IIP as it's integrated with the board so well... and it's modular so you could work on your own custom pal boxes.

Hmm, ok I downloaded it and am going to have a play around, I will let you know if I get it setup, and of course post any new things I add =)

Thanks =)