Modification Name: ubb_portal.pl - A Poor Man's UBB Portal

Author(s): Mike Bobbitt

Description: ubb_portal.pl is designed to work with a UBB content island. It reads through the posts listed in an HTML content island (styled or unstyled work OK), and generates a "news" page that can be included in a portal. As the content island is automatically updated by UBB, so is the news page.

Demo: http://Army.ca/main.php

Requirements: UBB 6.x, using Content Islands, access to crontab or scheduled tasks

Download Link: http://Perl.Bobbitt.ca/ubb_portal

Notes: No UBB modifications required. This script runs standalone, reading the content islands created by UBB and generating a "news" page that can be included in your portal.

Works with both recent topic and recent post CIs and can be configured to truncate long posts (with ...). Properly updates Graemlin links to work, and won't truncate in the middle of an HTML tag. A sample style sheet is included, to get things going.

In the demo link above, the centre colum ("Army.ca News") is the sample output.

Wow Mike....outstanding work!

Very cool (too bad I can't add scheduled tasks)! I think tho you should explain which CSS tags are used and where...

Thanks guys!

Good point LK.

EDIT: I've included a ubb_portal.css file in the zip.

You can change any of that through the code if you want (just search for each class name), but it's probably easier to just define the classes as you want to see them.

Cheers

Great work Mike

This is a new ubbnews-like script using CI?

Might wanna consider either closing the

with a or changing to

and changing <hr> to <hr />

I'm having a few problems with installing the portal.
(Somewhat off subject: I have a small teddy on the top of my monitor. A friend tells me whenever I have a coding problem, to talk to the teddy FIRST before I scream for help. It's good advice and has saved alot of friendships, however, I've talked to my teddy for the last hour or so....and I'm still stumped on this one)

First off:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
I'm getting this message after I've followed the instructions with all except one.

The one I haven't been able to figure out:
4. Enable ubb_portal.pl to be run as a cron job (*nix) or scheduled task (Windows). Sample crontab entry to run ubb_portal.pl every 15 minutes is:
00,15,30,45 * * * * /home/user/www/cgi-bin/ubb_portal.pl
(prays I don't need root access to the server or unix to do this.....) Could you dumb down your response to me? Give me a link to where I need to read up on this?

Also....I want to be sure on the paths....
my $ubbdir="/home/bobbitt/www/army/ubb";
my $ubbpath="http://Army.ca/ubb";
my $cifile="$ubbdir/ContentIslands/7/html.html";
my $outputfile="/home/bobbitt/www/army/includes/news.php";

I have:
my $ubbdir="/home/arianna/ubb/noncgi";
my $ubbpath="http://dimhorizon.com/ubb/noncgi/icons";
my $cifile="$ubbdir/ContentIslands/9/html.html";
my $outputfile="/home/arianna/ubb/noncgi/includes/news.php";

OTHER QUESTIONS:
*****
Do I chmod ubb_portal.php to 755 or 777? (Chmoded to 755 at the moment) I've tried both with no change...
Do I add a news.php blank file to the includes folder and chmod 755 or 777? (Chmoded to 755 at the moment) Or will ubb portal create the file?

I've checked and double checked my paths....
still getting the error...HELP!

Thanks for all that help.
Regards,
Arianna

ok...looks like my paths are ok. I've managed to get rid of
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

*talks once more to the teddy on her monitor*
betcha it's something exceptionally stupid that I'm forgetting!

This:
my $ubbpath="http://dimhorizon.com/ubb/noncgi/icons";

looks a little suspect, are you sure you want the /icons on the end?

I'm not a cron expert tho.. but it'll work at least once when everything (not including the cron task) is setup correctly 755 is fine on the permissions and the news.php file is created automagically once you set it up.

Everything should be ok now, except this....

Enable ubb_portal.pl to be run as a cron job (*nix) or scheduled task (Windows). Sample crontab entry to run ubb_portal.pl every 15 minutes is:
00,15,30,45 * * * * /home/arianna/cgi-bin/ubb_portal.pl

Allen,
What the heck is CRON? *grins*

Gotta love Google...
I've found out what Cron is...and also scheduled tasks... bummer. Was hoping this would be a little less a hassle to use. Gonna continue my research and see if I can get it to work.

BTW...it's still not working even without the Cron task. So something in either my paths or chmoding is foobar'd. :-/

You'll most likely need to get your server admin to set it up for you, unless you have some sort of control panel that allows you to set up a cron job

mike... you keep on amazing me...

it seems like the only thing you do is scripting! lol

i am still fine tuning your Album.pl, but now we have this again...

why do you keep on giving me that work...


but i love it!

thnx!

Cool job Mike.

Hi Guys. Go away for a weekend and you miss a lot!

Thanks for the HTML corrections Allen, I've updated the script with them. Good thing someone's keeping an eye on me.

Arianna, looks like you've figured out most of what's going on. What results (if any) do you get when you run ubb_portal.pl now? Is there a news.php file created? Does it have anything in it? There is a debug statement you can turn on ("$::debug=0;" changes to "$::debug=4;") but that may not help much.

messagedj, thanks! I actually do have a life -- well, sort of... I put this script together in an evening, so it didn't take too much time. Seems that's starting to show a bit...

Cheers

Hey, just noticed UBBDev is running ubb_portal.pl on the main page. Thanks!

Guess I need to make it look prettier now. Plus, it says 0 replies, but there are 6. Is that a script bug or is it just slow to update?

Quick note: I've added ubb_portal.css to the zip file, which has all the style classes pre-defined. I've also added some additional classes such as a header and footer block.

Thanks for the updates Mike

We don't have a cron job setup to update it.. not sure how yet without bugging an already over-worked navaho