Embedding forum category on website

LimitedWard

I am currently building a website with a Vanilla forum built in. On the homepage of the website, I want to display the top 5 most recent discussions within the "News" category of the forum.

Ideally, I would want to retrieve the first 100 words or so of each of those 5 most recent discussions with a link to read the entire discussion at the end (sort of like a snippet on the front cover of a newspaper).

Is this possible to do using Vanilla's API, and if so, how would I do it?

My website uses an Apache server with PHP and MySQL.

LimitedWard

Here's a screenshot of what I am talking about.

As you can see on the bottom left, I wanted to have a section for "News."

vrijvlinder

You could post the RSS feed for Vanilla discussions.

Just get a feed script and paste the url of the feed and then put that in your website.

http://jquery-plugins.net/FeedEk/FeedEk_demo.html

You can add the feed for all categories or several feeds one for each category and set up how much you want to show by way of character limit. This is a great plugin that I made into a vanilla plugin for here.

It is simple to set up and works like magic

hgtonight

Welcome to the community!

What version number of Vanilla are you running?

Is your main site running on top of Vanilla/Garden as well?

LimitedWard

@hgtonight said:
Welcome to the community!

What version number of Vanilla are you running?

Is your main site running on top of Vanilla/Garden as well?

I am running version 2.1.

I discovered a solution to it myself by connecting to the MySQL database and manually retrieving the all the discussions from my "News" category. Here's the code I used:

<?php 
    function getNews() {
        // Create connection
        $con=mysqli_connect("domain","user","password","vanilla");

        // Check connection
        if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
          echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
        }
        $data = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT * FROM gdn_discussion WHERE CategoryID=2 ORDER BY DateInserted DESC LIMIT 5") or die(mysql_error());
 ?>
        <div id="newsfeed">
              <h3>News</h3>
              <?php 
              while ($info = mysqli_fetch_array( $data )) {
                Print "<article>";
                Print substr( strip_tags( $info['Body'] ), 0, 500 );
                Print " <a href=\"/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/".$info['DiscussionID']."\">[...]</a>";
                Print "</article>";
              }
              mysqli_close($con);
               ?>
        </div>
 <?php 
 }
  ?>

Is it generally considered bad practice to do this? Also, I'm not very experienced with PHP and SQL; but I'm pretty sure I used deprecated code in the line that says
$data = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT * FROM gdn_discussion WHERE CategoryID=2 ORDER BY DateInserted DESC LIMIT 5") or die(mysql_error());. Do you know the proper way to catch that error?

vrijvlinder

Why go through that trouble when your main site is not Vanilla? This is what feed readers are for .... :S

LimitedWard

@vrijvlinder said:
Why go through that trouble when your main site is not Vanilla? This is what feed readers are for .... :S

I just figure it's more elegant from a programmer's perspective to use PHP when it's appropriate. I find that Javascript is better suited for editing pages on the fly, whereas PHP is designed to retrieve data as the page loads.

vrijvlinder

ok well here are some insights. Since there already is a feed you just either include or add as this article suggests

http://tiffanybbrown.com/2005/12/22/dynamic-rss-feeds-using-php-mysql-and-apache/

http://solutions.grabaperch.com/architecture/how-do-i-add-an-rss-feed

R_J

@LimitedWard said:
Is it generally considered bad practice to do this?

I don't know about that, but I personally would try to avoid that for the following reasons:
1. there is no permission check in your code
2. you disregard announcements, sunken discussions and deleted discussions
3. whatever the future might bring to Vanilla, your couldn't respect it
4. you are reinventing the wheel. Vanilla comes with functions that help you achieve what you want and so you wouldn't have to mess around with mysqli_query

Nevertheless it has often been said by wiser man than me, that loading the complete framework on top of your page for achieving only simple things isn't always a good idea. So you should answer hgtonights question if your site is already running on Vanilla.

If yes, use Vanillas build in functionality
If no, a) you might load Vanilla nevertheless and use its functionality and if you do not want to do that,
b) I would suggest you create a view and use that for direct queries. That way you will only have to change the view if future will bring any enhancements of the database (additional permission considerations, other handling of sunken discussions/announcements on your portal site, etc) that you have to take into consideration.

hgtonight

If your main site does not run Vanilla:

I would query the Vanilla db through an ajax request OR update a cached copy when editing/adding a discussion to your news category. Then include the cached view as a regular PHP include on your main site.

If you run something built on the Garden framework, you just need to create a new view for the categories controller and set that as your default controller.