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Topic: Researching forums and came to ElkArte (Read 8780 times) previous topic - next topic
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Researching forums and came to ElkArte

With questions!!!!

Great looking forums, came here during my research for a nice forum for our website.

Can ElkArte be bridged with Coppermine, confirmed by someone who has done this? I ask as I appreciate there is currently no gallery plugin available.

Is it relatively easy to export for example, the ten latest posts (thread titles only) to a webpage , such as one with a .php extension to make use of includes?

Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong forum.

Thank you.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #1

Welcome to ElkArte @maritimesbob . I don't think there is a bridge to Coppermine available at the moment. But I am sure you can hire someone to do it.

As for exporting latest posts, ElkArte has built in RSS feed. Does it help ?

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #2

I haven't installed the forum as yet, still at work at the moment!

Can the rss feed be play around with in admin such as what feed can be displayed, filtered etc or will that involve getting into the code a little?

I suppose I could filter the feed by use of a rss parser such as carp which I think filters.

Yeah was unsure on the CM bridge. smf used to bridge quite easily up until newer releases, anyway we don't want to discuss other forums here. Maybe someone else can chime in on that.

Thank you.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #3

I'm pretty sure you'd have to get into the code. On the good side, thanks to the many hooks in Elk you can do a lot without making any upgrade-incompatible changes.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #4

Thanks for all the helps guys. Lots to think about. Hopefully Elk is in it for the long haul

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #5

Hi and welcome! :)

Quote from: maritimesbob – Can ElkArte be bridged with Coppermine, confirmed by someone who has done this? I ask as I appreciate there is currently no gallery plugin available.
Yep, there is a Coppermine bridge:
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=2106.0
I thought there was something more recent, but I'm likely wrong... in case @Spuds may give a hint on that. :P

Quote from: maritimesbob – Is it relatively easy to export for example, the ten latest posts (thread titles only) to a webpage , such as one with a .php extension to make use of includes?
Latest 10 posts... You should be able to use SSI.php, something like:
Code: [Select]
<?php
require_once('/path/to/forum/SSI.php');

ssi_recentPosts(10);

this will echo something more than just titles, but you can control what you want to see with some php indeed:
Code: [Select]
<?php
require_once('/path/to/forum/SSI.php');

$latest_messages = ssi_recentPosts(10, null, null, 'return');
echo '<pre>';
print_r($latest_messages);
echo '</pre>';
Bugs creator.
Features destroyer.
Template killer.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #6

Yeah, something like in the attached image was what I wanted to display on my homepage.

Thanks for the response. It's all winning me over!!!!

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #7

Thats the latest Coppermine bridge that I did ... basically allows for the single login as I recall.  

If you intend to have several "blocks" you can also take at the portal, but may be overkill for what you want.

OT :: A weather site ... cool ! ... Reminds me that I really need to finish off my Gill Multi-Plate Radiation Shield (ie nested bowls) . I built an Arduino with a weather shield and it transmits its data to the WU via an electric IMP.  I intend to place the entire assembly inside the shield,

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #8

Ok, so making sure I get this right. Grab the latest SMF, unzip and find the bridge in there and use that one?

Yeah, just so it allows a member to access the gallery with their forum name and upload photos, nothing more really.

It's been so long since I used Coppermine and bridged it with a forum. I can't even remember if it respects the members permissions, would I as forum admin also be the Coppermine admin? Must be 8 years or more since I last played around with them!

Weather site, yeah that's a site I used to own and admin many years ago until family life took it all away and it was sold!!!! I kind of miss it, but boy you don't half realise how much a big website and forum can take from your time! Weather and websites, not a good combination with a wife and little kids!


Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #9

Just install ElkArte, and Coppermine ...

Then get the file in this post http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=2106.msg13434#msg13434 and place it in your Coppermine/bridge directory.  There will be a place inside coppermine to enable the bridge.   I've never really used coppermine, I converted/updated the bridge and did a simple test.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #10

Is Elkarte seo friendly, picked up easily by the friendly bots? BBs or forums back in the day used to be notoriously poor when it came to seo. The "printer page" was the way bots used to scan the forums the best, particularly with ipb and vbulletin.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #11

Do you have a lot of external links to your site?  If not the problem I've seen in terms of SEO is google puts a lot of emphasis on the most common internal links which unfortunately are not to content you want indexed.  Login, registration, contact, credits, help, etc.  I've suggested marking those pages noindex and now that I think about it maybe all those links should be nofollow.  I've had to manually demote such pages in google's sitelinks for example.   Google also thinks "logged" (as in the IP address), "views", and "quote" are big keywords for my site. 

Since marking many of those pages noindex I've noticed a huge drop in google impressions for the "listen to the letters / request another image" text at the bottom of the captcha which I assume is something only spam bots would search for.

Now granted I've never done much to search optimize my site, but I was surprised to see how much emphasis google is placing in the forum skeleton itself as opposed to the content.  This is probably not unique to elkarte though.

Re: Researching forums and came to ElkArte

Reply #12

Some interesting information there, thank you.