showing board title in rss feed

[crimpson]

Right now for each feed, it shows shows "topic - description" and I really need it to show "board title - topic - description".
I've been looking all on how to do this. It seems I have to edit news.php but I don't know what lines to replace and with what.
help on this would be awesome.

[Arantor]

Um... why?

[crimpson]

I'm building a directory of local crafters and when they post a new topic it shows up on my feed which is on the sites home html page. there's also a bunch of other categories like "fore sale" and "wanted"

one news feed looks like this:
"-Paint
Any still-usable paint for craft projects."

it needs to show the board title because when looking at the feed you don't know weather this person is looking for or trying to sell paint. the title would add "wanted" or "for sale" and thus make things a lot clearer.
this goes for my directory of crafters as well...
an example would be like this...

(board title) Fabric Crafters - (topic title) Quilts
(description of feed) lovely quilts custom made... blah blah blah...

so right now all I'm getting is topic title and description.

[Arantor]

Hmmm.

I see several things wrong here. If you're building a directory, would it not make more sense to use something dedicated to the task of being a directory?

Failing that, I can think of alternative ways to get notifications. Are you expecting other users to use this feed? If not, you could always use notifications rather than a feed, or even use the ability to pull per-board feeds and arrange it that way...

[crimpson]

The feed would be used by all of the siite's visitors, being on the home page. It'll be a live feed of the forums to make it easier to see new topics.
It's not just a directory. SMF is absolutely perfect for what I'm using it for. when i say directory i don't mean just a bunch of links, or anything like a phone book.

I thought of doing individual feeds, but i want all of the boards covered and if i do one for each board than what's the point? you might as well just be browsing the forum. I could do just a couple of the boards if that's my only option...
Is it that hard to show the board title in the rss feed?

[Arantor]

It's not that hard. But before I tell you the *multiple* places you will need to change it (since SMF supports something like half a dozen variants of RSS), I want to be sure I'm not wasting my time in doing it, i.e. by making sure you're using the right tool for the job.

And right now I'm still not convinced that a forum actually is the right tool for the job. But since I don't have anywhere near enough information to make a judgement on that, because you haven't given me the context to make that judgement, I can't really help you. (You see, I have a strong aversion to just giving out advice to people unless I'm sure it's right for them. Something about having a sense of ethics.)

[crimpson]

Fair enough I suppose. I haven't given a link to my site yet because it's very much in the early stages of development.
http://www.trinitycountycommunity.com is the main index page (it's a free css template as a place holder, the finished replacement is coming along nicely) http://www.trinitycountycommunity.com/forum/ is the forum (obviously) and It's still very new and being developed and not really open to members yet.
so now you can see what I'm going for here... either help me or don't. I have no problem editing the php pages if you tell me what to put in.

[Arantor]

So you've made boards for each of the different things... but I fail to understand how being a *forum* works for what you sound like you're trying to do. So, at best, someone makes a topic for things they're selling... which can be jumped on without any (semi-)objective feedback system like rankings with floods of replies.

This is what I mean about not using the right tool. The trade listing sites we have in this country, for example, allow for reviewing, for rankings and whatnot - and they don't look like or use forum software. For what you're trying to do I'm still not sure a forum software is the right tool for the job, and that any tweaks would be a stone trying to divert an entire river's course.

[crimpson]

well that's just like, your opinion man.
my county where I live needs this and you're only seeing a small part of the entire project. I've only just started the actual building of the site, but It's been in the planning stage for over a year and yes, a forum is exactly what we need for what we're trying to achieve. Your doubts don't concern me in the least.
whatever though if you don't want to help. I'll deal with the way it is and figure it out later.

[Arantor]

Then the very best of luck to you. I'm just saying that based on my years of experience dealing with all kinds of clients, very often they leap on a solution as the answer to their problem and spend an age making a square peg fit in a round hole.

[Oldiesmann]

Your country needs this? I'm also in the US and I also can't see how forum software will work very well for a directory listing / classified ads site.

[crimpson]

it's not suppose to compete with the paper classifieds, or sites like craigslist. We have a business directory already... several in fact. http://www.trinitycounty.com/Members/Show2.php
as part of this project we're giving crafters in very rural areas an easy and convenient outlet to advertise themselves, focused on a local level, when otherwise their options are impractical, inconvenient, or too damn much of a pain in the ass. we also need to bridge the social networking gap while simultaneously reducing and eliminating dependencies on *aheam* facebook. This has been talked about for many hours.
We're a very rual area that's about to hit a development spurt because of major highway work that's cutting out 20 minutes of commute to the nearest "city"... Redding. There's very little websites that are focused on online services for our county (and it's a BIG county) and none that offer what this project will... besides *cough*facebook.
The vast majority of residents live in mountainous areas where social networking is just beginning to bring the community together. Do I have to describe my entire reasoning and detailed explanation of our project? most of it's still on paper, so like I said, you're only sampling a small part of the over all project.
right now my entire county is relying on facebook for social networking, promoting events, selling crap, and overall any online advertising intended to reach the local area.
(this is our counties leading website right now... pathetic. www.trinitycounty.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/WeaverDeals/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/weaverauction/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/TrinityAlert/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/166134886893131/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/318227858278667/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/trinitycrimewatch/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/159207957444294/
that's just some of it. look up trinity county california on google maps.
all these groups want to get away from facebook, and it's not even designed to accommodate what some of these groups are trying to do.
please stop wasting my time and leading me on. we would really like the boards titles to be displayed in the feed but whatever.

[Kindred]

but see... Arantor is not actulaly being mean here...   he is asking very pertinent questions
and, it is important to use the right tool for a job rather than try to shoe-horn a piece of software into a role that doesn't really suit it.

That beign said - If what you are doing is loading a list of posts to your main page, I faile to see how an RSS feed is what you actually want.

If you are set on using a forum for this...  then loading content to your front page would be much more easily accomplished by using SSI functions.
...and see, this is again what I mean by shoe-horning - you have some bizarre idea in your mind about how things "should" work -- what you SHOULD be doing is explaining what your final GOAL is and then asking us "what is the best way to do this?" rather than "how do I make this cat bark like a dog?"

[crimpson]

My understanding is that the SSI function only works on php and shtml and we have no php experts. I work mainly on html and css with a few tricks and learning as I go. we are not building our index as a php page. The rss feed I have on the html index right now is beautiful (unfinished as it is). what's wrong with using rss? it's easier to implement where we want the feed, and it does all we want it to (except show the board title). http://www.trinitycountycommunity.com/ so what's wrong with how I'm using it? as it is right now it's almost perfect in our opinion.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/ssi_examples.php
this example looks terrible compared to how I've set up the rss feed. I see that it offers a whole bunch more in what it can feed from the forum such as polls and whatnot, but we don't need all of that on the index (which is not just for the forum) and the rss seems to show just what we want it to.

[Kindred]

php works just fine in combination with HTML

Koodi [Valitse] Laajenna


<?php require_once('/path/to/SSI.php'); ?>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
TEXT GOES HERE
</div>
<div>
<?php ssi_recentTopics(8, 2, null, 'echo'); ?>
<!-- This will include the 8 most recently posted to topics from board ID=2) -->
</div>
</body>
</html>


As for how it LOOKS....   that is really straight forward as well.
instead of <?php ssi_recentTopics(8, 2, null, 'echo'); ?>
you use <?php $display_posts=ssi_recentTopics(8, 2, null, 'block'); ?>
you can the call out (using echo) each and every variable within the post object in whatever format you want.


And what's wrong with the way you are using it?
You are spending time and effort to do something one way (and in a way that is not supported), when it is already supported and DONE in a different way

[crimpson]

ok unfortunately i don't know php well enough to implement that. I understand what your saying using echo but I haven't learned enough php to know how to use it properly. I'm trying to use the rss because it was much easier (to my knowledge) to implement it into my html page and style it with css so it fits the layout. I'm going to have to study the ssi from scratch which i really don't have time for right now and possibly not any time really soon.
with the rss all I had to do was put the feed url into feedroll.com and it spits out a simple script that I can throw anywhere on my site and style with its own css sheet.

[Arantor]

With a fairly large performance penalty on top just for good measure. SSI may not be particularly efficient but it's always going to outperform RSS for doing what you're doing there.

[Kindred]

wow...


so rather than learn to use the tools that exist and do EXACTLY what you want, you would rather try to twist the RSS feed so that it can display something extraneous which gets sent to another site and then back to your own site for display?


oooooooookay....   if that's what you really want, then have fun with that.

[crimpson]

good points. In my defense I didn't know about the ssi features and I'll have to fit in some studying time on that.
However, rss shows a live feed where you don't have to refresh the page to update correct? ssi wouldn't and the page would need to be refreshed if you wanted to update the feed correct?
aside from that, I assume the ssi feed can be styled with css right? I'll take a harder look at it, but we do really like the way the rss feed looks and functions... but having to run it through another site is a drawback I guess.

[All Colours Sam]

rss and ssi aren't that different, they both share the same origin, they just differ on the "presentation" so to speak.

The whole live thing can be accomplished on both cases, most of the rss readers aren't actually "live", what they do is fetch all the entries and show you just 5 and then 3 seconds later they show you another 5 and so on.