Main page news script not synchronized with News forum. The front page is pulling the news from a different database. It does not show my upgrade post or Chile's reply to my Florida post.
I wrote a Vbulletin 3.06 news script for the main page of TheHelper. I am currently working on the cascading styles for presentation, and wondering what other useful formatting I could add to make it less generic looking without changing the overall look of the site (As I was asked not to touch).
The Tutorials section will also have a news script to take information from the tutorial news forum, and present on the subdomain.
I'll tell you this. It SS includes a file called news.html, so thats what would get altered.
The template also has these values, which you can use for colors. Most of them are for the search script. The ones I use are title, smalltitle (titles are the blue) tutorial (common text) and menu. You can also add any you like to menutop.shtml
bear in mind, also, that vBulletin allows you to post in different colors.
Because I wrote my own bbcode parser for our news blog, the color you post in should be the one to show up in any news script. If you post some text larger, it should also appear larger in the blog.
However, this does bring about a small challenge to ensure that the output news text is an appropriate color for the WC III News blog. I may still have some work ahead of me, heh.
I was not actually thinking of making the news script the entire content of the tutorials main page. What I was actually envisioning was just like the first 8 articles summarized at the top of the page like on thehelper.net and then the current content of the page, what is there now. I like the completed projects and the request for tutorials on the front page. In other words, my vision was the news headlines like the recent forum posts on thehelper.net main page and really that was all.
I also considered the same summary headlines and displaying maybe 3 messages from the news on the page.
I think it would also be good if the world editor forum style was the same as the tutorials site, sharing the same sidebar. In other words, not thehelper.net sidebar but the tutorials sidebar instead on the forum then the colors and title and graphics matching the tutorials site.
In other words, to make the forum look like it was part of the tutorials site, which in reality it is.
That news sample page I linked, would be on the front page, after the introduction and hosted projects. It takes that file and SSI includes it into the home page at the end.
It was only by itself because it was a concept for the script.
This would essentially replace the news I have listed at the bottom.
Sounds good to me - except I would add the little summary of like the last 8 news posts at the very beginning to balance it all out - or maybe the last 8 posts on the Warcraft forum. I think the news should be presented at least in summary first but I would also want that to fit on the very first screen that you could view with the current page content. In my vision but as far as the Tutorials site is concerned I give you veto power.
We can off the second paragraph, or add just news titles before submissions, and the full news at the bottom. Or both. I can almost see the news on mine.
Of course, as the completed projects grew, this would get pushed down. Sadly though, I am pretty sure Mind and I are the only ones who've 'officially' released anything for download since I signed up. Posted maps are tests and concepts.
And now that I say that, I can't help but feel a little bit like I'm wasting time. Heh.
[edit]
If this forum adds 3 inches to the right of a photo and widens all the posts, is that a display error?
Chile is busy upgrading his site RPG Stars with his new forum software plus he is on a 7 day straight work binge. I don't know if he is going to be active to integrate this. I can probably hack something together but it probably will not look as good as Chile can make it and if the site is not PHP it will not work.
The beauty of the news script, even if it's pretty ugly php, is that it can be used for every forum on the board, can display images posted in the forums, and can even be tweaked to present the most recently replied topics instead of the last posted topics.
If the divisions of the tutorial page are saved as .php extentions, and are properly divided (meaning one php file is left, one is right, etc) then it's really easy to include them in a forum style. This is how our left panel and head banner are done on the main forums here. It makes the navigation and headers truly global for this domain.
Actually the issue I think SD_Ryoko is talking about is just the news script integration with the Tutorials main page. We can definitely do that without doing what we are talking about in the other forum.... As a matter of fact I am thinking about moving this thread.
I'm on a page about incorrect corrections, and spent the better part of like two hours trying to get someone to understand that -5^2 = -25, not 25, and then that post had comments get reposted because that group is self sustaining, and that person was in turn trying to explain what I just explained to them. And I'm taking that as a victory
I will be AFK for a couple of days you guys hold down the fort while I am gone. I will be checking in on my phone but that will severly limit me. Be back saturday!
I just got to watch the video because even though I was there I was trying to work out tech problems with the chat since I was the social media guy so I was distracted but check it out guys the video is super fucking great!