futuretrack5

Pimping a PHP Bulleting Board

Posted by Mike Skinner June 29, 2006

A few weeks ago I installed phpBB2 on one of my Linux servers at work. A colleague enquired about an RSS feed, so I whipped up a little PHP script.

What is RSS?
Like XHTML, RSS is also an XML document. The purpose of RSS is to share/syndicate information with your visitors and affiliate sites.

In English?
RSS is a URL with a collection of news/blog articles associated with a website. Each article has a link to the article, a title, a brief description, an author and a publishing date. If you have interesting content, your visitors will bookmark your RSS “feed” to let them know when to come back.

Pimp my board!
Download PHP 4/5 file to generate an RSS2 feed for phpBB2
1) Just drop the PHP file into your phpBB directory (the one with config.php in it).
2) Set the value of $BaseURL and $BBTitle.
3) Then add the following inside the HEAD tags of any phpBB template that you have installed:
<link href=”http://server/phpBB2/file.php” rel=”alternate” title=”RSS” type=”application/rss+xml” />
(alter the href attribute to point to the PHP file that you saved)

This script displays newest posts at the top, in the following format: post-id#) username: post-title

Feel free to modify this script to your heart’s content.

In other news, Digg v3 is out. It’s a great example of XHTMLized Web 2.0 goodness from a collaborative news site.