Listings on main site home page

[LukeOut]

I would like to add the NEW or FEATURED or TOP listings on my sites home page (www.mysite.com). The 68 Classifieds is a folder within my main site (www.mysite.com/classifieds). Can I use an include to do this? Is it even possible? I looked in the mods area but saw nothing. Thanks.

[Eric Barnes]

I have done this before but with two different sites. 68 Classifieds has a file external.php that will print an rss feed for listings. I used this and a php rss reader to print the latest ads.

[LukeOut]

So point the reader to www.mysite.com/classifieds/external.php and it will read this file? Or is there more to it?

[Eric Barnes]

That should be all you have to do. It does have some parameters you can use:

type=number <-- Category
owner=number <-- The owner id. This would be just their listings
searchtext=text <-- This would be any search keywords.
limit=number <-- The number to show. Default is 15

So to use these you would call:
external.php?type=1&owner=1&searchtext=ford&limit= 20

Any of these can be used or not used. But that is just an example.

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by LukeOut

So point the reader to www.mysite.com/classifieds/external.php and it will read this file? Or is there more to it?

There is a little more to it. As Eric pointed out in the post above, the file external.php returns an RSS feed which is XML formatted. If you want to display this in a table or what have you you will need to manually parse the XML/RSS or use a premade class to do it.

Alternatively you can just do your own database call selecting the records you want.

[juven14]

If you are willing to use smarty on your main site, you can copy the smarty plugin over and display it anywhere on you site in the same manner as you did within the classifieds directory.

I've tested it, and plan on doing this myself. I included the database connection and copied over the plugin. One thing to note, I had to copy the currency function from functions.php inside of the plugin. Works like a charm.

[LukeOut]

Thanks for all of your help. I have gotten it to work fine with the reader. I assume the only thing being returned here is the TITLE and the LINK, right? At least my reader only picks up those 2 items.

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by LukeOut

Thanks for all of your help. I have gotten it to work fine with the reader. I assume the only thing being returned here is the TITLE and the LINK, right? At least my reader only picks up those 2 items.

There is a date and description as well. If you point a browser to external.php you can easily make out the fields.

PEAR's xml-rss works very well and is easy to use.

http://pear.php.net/package/XML_RSS


***EDIT*** I stand corrected there isnt a description by default. I forgot I modified mine to include more fields.

[juven14]

The fields set up in the rss-mod are:

Site Title
Site Description

Listing Title
Listing Short Description
Listing Link
Listing Image URL
Date (Today's date, I think) - this was changed, maybe Chaslie can update the file, it should be dateadded.

Which of these displayed is determined on the rss-template file.

As for the default external.php

It should display:

Site Title
Site URL
Site Description

Listing Title
Listing Link
Listing Creator
Listing dateadded

[Chaslie]

John,

Date (Today's date, I think) - this was changed, maybe Chaslie can update the file, it should be dateadded.

That was in the files we worked on when trying to hook it up with the V3.1 beta. That amended version of external.php only works with V3.1.