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.

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 20, 2001 10:59 PM: Message edited by: Djnemesis ]</font>

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.

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 21, 2001 02:42 AM: Message edited by: LK ]</font>

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.