vBulletin LTS

vB News Ticker
Mod Version: 1.03, by davidw

What does this do? It allows you to take your news from your news forums (up to 9 news forums) and display them. You have a choice on how many you can pull from each forum, how fast you want the ticker to scroll, the length of the title of each news item, etc.

This works on 3.5.4, 3.5.5, and should work on pretty much any of the 3.5.x. I've not tested this for 3.6, but I have been told that it does work for 3.6.

Install/Upgrade Instructions

Step 1: Go to your admin Control Panel => Styles & Templates => Style Manager
Find your Master/Parent style or the style you wish to add this to and drop down the All Style Options menu dropdown and choose Edit Templates
Click Go if it does not redirect you
Open up your Forum Home Templates subdirectory and choose your FORUMHOME template

Find Add above Click Save & Reload

Step 2: Go to your admin Control Panel => Plugin System => Manage Products => [Add/Import Product];
Click Browse and find product-christianb_vbnews_ticker.xml
Remove contents of second line ./includes/xml/product.xml
Click the button next to Yes in Allow Overwrite
Click Import

Step 3: Go to your admin Control Panel => vBulletin Options => vBulletin Options => vB News Ticker => [Edit Settings]
Alter Settings as appropriate
*** IMPORTANT *** Make sure that if you do not enter an item in the forumIDs after the first one, the rest must be set to 0
- if it is not set to 0 or a forumid number, it will result in a database error.
Click Save

I've included the readme and the .xml Product/Plugin in the zip file.

If there are features you'd like to see for a future release, please let me know.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the forumid?
The forumid is the id of the forum you have created. Each forum has its own unique number assigned to it. When you click on a forum link you can see a number that is assigned to it. This will show up in the URL of the page you are browsing. Another way of seeing the forumid is to go to your admin control panel => Forums & Moderators => Forum Manager => Click on [Expand All] and then move your mouse over (hover) any of the forums you've created. Your status bar (bottom of screen) should display your forumid (number at the end of the link/url).

How do I add the news ticker to the IBProArcade or Photoplog?
Thanks to Mark.B for his add -

Spoiler (click to open)

Quote by davidw

I can look into the arcade (although it's not my modification), but I'm not sure what to suggest for vbplaza and photoplog as I don't use those (although photoplog I will use for my next site).

As I don't use this mod myself, I can't vouch for the below, but try this:

ibproarcade: edit the file arcade/functions/functions.php
Find:

Code:

global $header,

Add after:

Code:

 $vbnews_ticker,

Note there's a space at the start of that line.

Photoplog: the same variable needs to be added into admincp > Photoplog > modify settings > global variables. Add "vbnews_ticker" to the list on a new line. Note....no "$" at the start!!

vBPlaza I dunno as I have not used it, but it will be something similar to one of the above.

This sorts it out for most modifications. Hopefully it will for this.

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Changes

1.0.4 Added security

1.0.3 Changed the hook location from forumhome_complete to global_start giving admin ability to put the news ticker most places rather than in forum home.
Updated the query to remove a JOIN that may have been causing delays.

1.0.2 Added instructions to comment out unneccessary query pulls in the array to reduce wait times.
Optimized the query by removing non-essential SELECTs.
Added option for user to separate news items in admincp.
Fixed IE whitespace issue for ticker height as seen here:

Spoiler (click to open)

TBH, I'm not sure why it is slow (in testing most of the time 7-8 out of 10 times it worked fine) but I think it could have something to do with the subquery. However, I don't know for sure. However, I am caching templates, so that should speed things up on the ticker.

EDIT: in the control panel, go to vbulletin options => vB News Ticker => Ticker Height => change the number from 50 to 10. That should fix it.

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1.0.1 Fixed a width issue as seen here:

Spoiler (click to open)

hey there, cool mod (installed)

Is there a way to make the stream continuous? For some reason on my forum it goes through the forums listed, waits till the last of the text clears, then starts again.

Also, there's a little browser-compliance issue:

Code:

marquee width="{$vboptions[tickwidth]}"%

makes the width of the marquee 100 pixels (if it's set to 100) in IE. Easy fix:

Code:

marquee width="{$vboptions[tickwidth]}%"

move the "%" inside the the quote, gives you the proper width in IE and firefox.

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Known Bugs/Issues:
From my testing on the new updates, when I (or a user on my site) clicks on any of the links that has the news ticker, it works fine, but when I or a user hits the refresh button, it can hang. I'm unsure why this is happening.

Temporary demo location:
http://www.christianboards.org/forum.php