News Feeds Tab -- Plugin Request

Could I get some opinions on how difficult this would be to implement?

Here's the idea: a tab that incorporates an RSS feed from a blog external to one's CB site. The tab would display a users X posts (from their external blog on the tab). This would work in a similar manner to Joomla's standard "News Feeds", in fact, I imagine it could actually use the News Feeds component -- adding the feed to that component (making News Feeds from all users browsable).

Let me know what you think -- if anybody's willing to help me out on this, let me know.

My PHP is getting better, but if I'm not hacking something, I'm no good -- and I'm still learning the CB API.

Regards!

Hi Y'All,

Scuba was good enough to point out a hack he did for mod_fetchrss. I'll include it here. However, I am having problems displaying modules on profile pages, they only appear when I edit the profile, they don't appear on the regular profile. Any ideas?

Here's a quote from Scuba:

hacked the mod_fetchrss mamboforge.net/projects/fetchrss/ to display the individual blog feed of which ever Community Builder www.mambojoe.com user profile you are viewing at the time. You have to create a "My Blog Feed" field for the CB user to input their blog feed url. This basically eliminates the problem of creating a fancy Mambo compatable blog system. Now your users can use whatever they prefer.

See the attached file for the changes I made to mod_fetchrss.php. You will have to change "myblog" in the SELECT statement to whatever you name your user blog feed field in CB.

Right now this is set up to work in a module block placed below the CB user profile and it pulls the blog feed based on the POST id of the user.

You could change this to hardcode whatever user id you wanted and place the module anywhere on your site. So for example you could have a online newspaper/magazine with writers contributing form various blog sources. Then make a module for each writer and you have a section display for each one that automatically updates when they post to their blog.

Anyway -- it looks like scuba may in the future make a tab for this hack. It's a cool idea.

[code:1]/** ensure this file is being included by a parent file */
defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Direct Access to this location is not allowed.' );


global $mosConfig_live_site, $mosConfig_absolute_path, $cur_template, $database, $_REQUEST;


$cacheDir = $mosConfig_absolute_path .'/cache/';
$LitePath = $mosConfig_absolute_path .'/includes/Cache/Lite.php';
require_once( $mosConfig_absolute_path .'/includes/domit/xml_domit_rss_lite.php' );

$database->setQuery( "SELECT myblog FROM #__comprofiler WHERE user_id='".$_REQUEST."'"«»);
$blogs = $database->loadResult();

if ($blogs!='') {
$url = "http://".$blogs."";
} else {
$url = '';
}
$cache = $params->get( 'cache' );
$rss_title = $params->get( 'rss_title' );
$rss_descr = $params->get( 'rss_descr' );
$item_descr = $params->get( 'item_descr' );
$nbitems = $params->get( 'nbitems' );
$target = $params->get( 'target' );[/code:1]

Hi Scubaguy! (or anybody else that would help)

This code seems not to work... Should this be like this:?

$database->setQuery( "SELECT myblog FROM #__comprofiler WHERE user_id='".$_REQUEST."'");

Did you ever get a working RSS tab? I saw at least one CB site that had one working.

Yes -- I did feed2js -- do a forum search and you'll find the plugin if you want to check it out.