What is it?: A mod that will load different showflat and showthreaded templates for the forums you select in the admin panel, as well as use a different template for the printed view of an article post.
Why should you care?: Having articles in UBB Threads is pretty cool, but they look like the rest of the posts. The "posted by" column takes up a lot of space on a long post, and since most articles are pretty long the posted by info kills off a lot of room. This mod removes the posted by column for the forums you specify. It also will not display the edit, reply, and quote buttons for users who do not have the right to post in your article forum(s).
Who gets the props?: JoshPet for SQL commands, Gardener for scripting ideas, AllenAyres and Astaran for feedback. This one was definitely a group effort <img src="/threads/php/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />
Just follow the instructions included in the zip file. For an example of how it looks check out this article at Da LAN Tech.
01 Jan 04: Updated for Threads 6.4 and included instructions for using a special print thread template for your articles.
Do you guys conspire together, checking my site to see when I add something or have something done, and then come out with something better over here? Don't lie to me guys! I see what you're doing.
No, I was just having some software written as "article" software. I wanted something like this but never thought of it, of course . I'm just givin you a hard time man.
Okay, I don't know if you have time for this, nor if you would even want to, but I have some suggestions for this mod.
You know how tld works, with the different categories etc. I'm assuming. Going with that, you could make articles sections, such as: sports-baseball, football, basketball; women-pretty, ugly, pretty ugly; category 3-sub cat one, sub cat two, sub cat three.
Take my site for instance. I'd have an articles page, with a customized threads template that would let the users choose to read articles by category: nursing, travel nursing, men in nursing, etc. or by specialty under nursing: er, or, med surg, etc. Or by author.
Then you could assign authors to their own catogory and give their "weekly column" a name, or you could allow them permission to contribute to a set number of categories.
This would basically be the same as giving permission to post in a forum, only the posts would be categorized in more of a links type format, and the text of the articles would appear just like a typical article on any other site.
You're not crazy, but it might be overkill for what you're ultimatley trying to do.
On this site Josh developed a special page for mods that lets you click on a button to get all the mods for Threads 6.2 (for example), and to search the mods. He was kind enough to give me a copy of the php script and template that he used to make that page, and I'm going to hack it to develope an "article index" for my site. When I'm finished I'll release it as a mod that anyone can use on their own site. It's gonna be a while before I can get to it though cause I'm knee deep in developing a template set for Threads 6.3.
As for asigning people to write columns: Just create groups for your authors, give write permissions to those groups in the forums you want them to post in, and asign authors to the groups. Then if someone wants to write a colomn they can post it in whatever article forum you've given them permission to post in (you can even set up post moderation in those forums).
I'm hesitant to do any article development in TLD because it's not finished yet.
an "article index" for the articles forum would be cool DLT, when you get a chance... could give someone ultimately a 'front end' for an entire articles/interviews/etc section
I'm not sure what you are asking. If you want to be able to post an article in Threads, and then call that post and put it into a page using a script that is outside of the Threads directory then that's easy. All you have to do is require the Threads library, querry for the post, and then create a template to display the article... sounds like a lot, but it's realy not that bad
Allen also makes a good point: If you take a look at how the ubbtnews.php script works (it's in the addons directory under your Threads directory) you should be able to figure out how to make the page you want.
[]AllenAyres said: an "article index" for the articles forum would be cool DLT, when you get a chance... could give someone ultimately a 'front end' for an entire articles/interviews/etc section <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> [/]
Well done Dalantech. I had done something else using the ubbtnews.php in the addons but it was becoming a pain to keep it seperate. Your templates are great, I'm going to do some minor changes to the templates to fit better into my setup. Thanks for the hack!
It wouldn't hurt to try it -but I can't tell you if it will work since I don't run 6.3 anymore. If it doesn't work then post your 6.3 showflat and showthreaded templates and I'll see if I can hack them for you.
For 6.5 I'll start a new thread so that the version here will be frozen.
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