I was wondering if it would be possible to mod the News function of Efiction to pull it's stories from a board of your choice from SMF if you have your site bridged to it? In this way, if you have a news section of the forum, instead of having to add the news there and then to the News section of Efic, you could just add it in that forum.
The news comments could then be the other posts added to that thread. Anyway, it's just an idea that popped into my head just now, and isn't very well thought out yet. Still, if anyone here think they could do it or has any comments...
EDIT: And support for BB code too...
Look on the ssi_examples.php file that is included in the SMF download. It should give you a place to start. However, I think it might be easier and better to include the news from efiction on the forums rather than the other way around. The SMF templates are written in php, making an include easier. Also, it is much easier entering news into efiction than SMF.
Thanks for the heads up about the ssi_examples.php file. After glancing at that, I think that this just may be doable. I thought of including the news from efiction on the forums too, but I wanted something where members without admin rights or who are members of a usergroup would be allowed to post news as well. In addition, if the forum is used instead of the news from efiction, I won't have clueless members emailing and PMing me about how to include links or special formating etc. My archive isn't that big with only a little over 600 members, but that sort of thing gets old really fast.
Anyway, I'm going to look at this and see if it's something I can do, but if anyone beats me to it, please share? I'm not too good at coming up with my own mods, 🙁 but I do like trying.
I think you can easily use the extraheader.php and assign the include a variable to include in your skins. As far as I know, it's not easy to include php in the tpls themselves. (Quite frankly, I've never used the extraheader.php either, so it might not be any easier. But I know that's what it's there for.)
I like to use variables.php for assigning output, though I assume both would work well.
I don't have a SMF install, so this is probably a bit off, but you could do something like the following.
$tpl->assignGlobal("forum_news", ssi_news())
Then put {forum_new} into your tpl template wherever you want it displayed.
I've thought about this some more and realized that it might be simpler to just disable the news block and create a new block that does everything I want and include it on the index page as the news block. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.
extra_header.php is used to put extra information (like javascripts) into the header portion of the page before the page contents are built. I think what you'd want to do in this situation is modify the news block to pull information from the SMF table in question (don't know what that would be) instead of the eFiction's news table and just feed it back into the news block in eFiction.
