Server-Side

One feature that I worked on for my own guilds’ website (Oath of Exodar) was a section that had recent items from websites like wowprogress.com or wowjutsu.com so people could see our recent items. This ended up being harder than expected since I also wanted a way to make sure the items also worked as tooltips/links, much like lrguild.org.

Since our current guild site is based on vBulletin 3.8.x, I was able to use the vBadvanced add on to get a nice front page look to the site. Using some hacks for a module, I would later than be able to make a hidden forum that each item would be post in as a new thread. These thread titles/descriptions would when be used as the “Character name – Item name” text on the pages.

This first guide will explain how to set up vBulletin (3.8.x, but will probably work on most) with vBadvanced to have a module on the front page that shows recent items, with working Wowhead item links.

Things you will need:

• vBulletin
• vBadvanced
• Wowhead item tooltips for vBulletin

1. In vBulletin, create a new forum (wherever you want) that has a title similar to Recent Items, but you can name it whatever you want. Users, and even you if you want, cannot see this forum. Unless of course, you know the exact URL.
2. To make it invisible to everything but the scripts,  under “Forum is Active,” set the radio button to “No“.
3. I’d recommend also making the posts not count to user post counts unless you want to set up a user account specifically for RSS Feed Bot posting. I usually make a user called Feed on all my vBulletin sites for this purpose.
4. Go to Forum Permissions, and Deny All to the new forum you created. If you want access to this on your account, go to your user settings, and give yourself an access mask to see the forum. This might be useful for maintenance and testing.

Next we’re going to set up a Module for vBadvanced that reads information from this forum and posts the thread titles (body messages would/could be the same, but I don’t do both obviously.)

1. We are going to need to make a module similar to the News Module that comes with vBadavanced. In fact, we’re just going to copy it and make some modifications so that you only see the Title line of the RSS Feed.
2. Go to Styles & Templates in your vBulletin Admin Console and go to Style Manager.
3. Then go to:  Default Style -> Add New Template -> Press Go.
4. For the title, call it adv_portal_itembits.
5. We’re going to use this code below, it is based off the same code of the vBadvanced News module, just chopped down to what we need.

Download the Source Code here.

Now save the template. Since we put this in the Default Style, the template should be inherited by all the child styles you added to the Default Style. If you added your styles as parents, you may need to add this template to each parent style. Next we are going to set up the vBadvanced module itself.

1. In the vBulletin Admin Console, vBa CMPS -> Add Modules -> [Template Module].
2. Name the module.
3. In Template to Include add itembits. (This would make it look like adv_portal_itembits)
4. Highlight (by holding control) all or some of the styles you want this to be added to (should be all of them.)
5. Scroll down, set any permission options you want.
6. Click Save, then add this module to the vBadvanced pages you want, and select its’ column order, just like any other module.

Go back and install the Wowhead item tooltips for vBulletin if you already haven’t. Check it’s configuration to change any settings you want.

Now we’re done setting up the hard part of vBulletin and vBadvanced. The only time we will need to go back to vBulletin is to set the RSS Feed Posting Robot to post the content of the feeds of your choice.

That brings us to the next part, getting a RSS feed of your guilds’ recent loots. My next article on this subject will cover how to use Yahoo! Pipes and Wowprogress.com’s RSS feeds to generate the RSS feed we need (and automatically inserting [item] and [/item] around the items so the Wowhead addon parses the item data to generate the links/tooltips!)