[Addon] CinVin FPS_External for vB 3.5.x

[Kevin]

Over at vBulletin.org I've posted the first public version of FPS External for vB 3.5.x -- Eventually I'll be switching the primary point of contact for it to here at CinVin but for now you can find it at:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=105008

If you're not familiar with FPS External, essentially it's a re-write of the external.php utility for creating RSS feeds. You can find the old version here to read up on some of the new options & capabilities it offers. Currently there are no plans of continuing to update the old vBulletin 3.0.x version.

[Kevin]

Attached is a beta version that I'm working on. Before I release it as an update on vb.org feedback would be appreciated.

The changes in this version are:

• New vBSEO compatibility option! I am in the midst of relaunching a site that has been mothballed for a few months so in order to test the benefits of vBSEO I've purchased a new license for that site. It's a slick package but it's effectiveness will be a long term test. Please note that for now I only have the vBSEO code in the RSS type feeds (rss, rss1, and rss2); if nobody reports any problems then the next release will include the XML and JS types. If you're are using vBSEO then find and change...

  $use_vbseo_links = false;

  ... instead be true.

  $use_vbseo_links = true;

• New inline CSS style. The RSS feeds are meant to be viewed with an RSS new aggregator, not viewed in a browser. When viewed in a browser the user will just see the raw tags. Want to display something different to your 'human' viewers instead? Make sure you upload both of the files in the attached zip file (the CSS was not in prior releases) and then find and remove the below line:

  $feed_style = NULL;

• New thread quantity max. It was recommended as a sanity check that if we're going to allow the users to specify the quantity of threads in the feed then there should be a maximum amount allowed to prevent somebody from being malicious and specify some high number with the intent of killing your server. The maximum I have in there now is 50.
• Cleaned up the code a bit. Rearranged a few things and changed some hard-coded values to be variables instead. The goal is to make it easier to make changes going forward.

Please let me know of any problems and what your results are.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Kevin]

Latest version... this one fixes the date to be fully valid again.

[Torqued]

I have vBSEO... I'll load this/check it out in the next couple of days...

Also, one feature that I would love to see would be an RSS feed of upcoming events from the calendar. *beg* *grovel*

[Kevin]

Torqued, I'll see what I can do. I haven't looked at the vB calendar tables yet so this would be a good way to get familiar with them.

What type of information would you want to see out of them? The basics should be easy enough but what you envision for calendar items that span dates, etc.?

[Torqued]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Torqued, I'll see what I can do. I haven't looked at the vB calendar tables yet so this would be a good way to get familiar with them.

What type of information would you want to see out of them? The basics should be easy enough but what you envision for calendar items that span dates, etc.?

I have the beta external.php file running @ my site w/ vBSEO and it seems to be working fine. My site is http://www.informaticsnurse.com and I'm also running some of my feeds through feedburner.

For the Calendar RSS feed, I can see how you could want to have it grouped by event or grouped by date. Grouped by event would be most useful for me because I have a lot of conferences scheduled on my calendar. But a grouped by date could be useful for a site that wanted to have a feed of things happening for the next X number of days.

Since conferences often have registration deadlines weeks or months in advance, it would be nice to be able to specify the start and stop dates of the range to pull from. For example, pull all events scheduled between 3 and 9 months (90 - 270 days) from now.

For the actual feed content, nothing too fancy.

Event Title
Event Date (Date range if grouped by event)
Event Information (maybe limit # of characters pulled)
URL to Calendar Event

Also maybe an option to specify calendar_id to pull from. I could see how this would be useful for people with multiple calendars. I don't have multiple calendars, but thought I'd just toss that idea out there.

[Kevin]

After looking at your site, I understand why you would want the calendar feeds.

I'll put it on my To Do list. On the short list of things to do is to allow people to choose whether the first post in a thread is shown (the default action) or to show the last post in a thread and then a cache system.

I like the idea of specifying the calendar ID so I'll make sure that's in there as well. One of the ideas I've been toying with in my head is a 'source' type option to specify the source of the feeds (eg: the forums [default], a gallery, a links directory, a classifieds directory, etcetera) so treating the calendar as a source might fit in nicely then.

[Torqued]

Thanks for taking the Calendar RSS feed into consideration.

A Calendar RSS feed could solve another problem for me and many other users. I've yet to see a good, supported hack for getting calendar events into a forum as a post. If I was able to get a Calendar RSS feed, I could import my own events into my forums as posts via the ArticleBot mod.

On a slightly different tangent, when I remove the $feed_style = NULL; it just displays the textual info of the feed, but there are no hyperlinks... is it supposed to be like that? I'm not clear on what the purpose of that option is.

FYI, I really like the source idea... it'd be nice if I could get an RSS feed of links from my vBAdvanced Links system.

I wish I was a php coder. I have lots of great ideas, but no skillz.

[Kevin]

Calendar... I'm always up for a challenge.

CSS style... Yes & no. It's displaying as text only because the CSS is removing certain elements so what I need to figure out how to do next is to get the CSS to format the output but to retain the hyperlinks. The purpose is so that a real person viewing the feed sees the content nice & neat and formatted while an RSS aggregator still gets the raw XML feed.

vBa Links... OOhh, good one. I run vBGallery on several of my sites and was planning on doing something with that in regards to the 'source' option but I forgot about vBa Links. {Kevin scribbles more notes in his mental Task List.}

[Torqued]

Excellent!

If you need more help testing stuff on a vBSEO site, just let me know... I'm also running vBAdvanced Links as well as PhotoPost vBAdvanced Gallery (or whatever the heck they're calling it now)

I love RSS feeds!