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In this guide, I will explain how to use Yahoo! Pipes to read, parse, and create a RSS feed that is friendly twards the Recent Loot module that we created earlier from the feeds at Wowprogress.com.

First off, head over to Yahoo! Pipes and create a new account, or log in if you already have one. Then head over to Wowprogress.com and find your guild’s page.

You should find something similar to a RSS Feed Reader on their page by scrolling down, make sure you sort by Phat Loot and click the RSS icon. Save this feed URL. It should look something similar to this:

You’ll notice how this feed has the information we need, but had to much extra info and needs formated to what will work with our project.

Let’s make a pipe that formats this data:

1. On the Pipes page, hit Create a pipe.
2. Use this image, and create it exactly. Make sure you make the URL of the feed your guilds’ from the wowprogress.com site.
3. Save the feed. Copy down the URL of the RSS feed (you can find this on your Pipes page.)

Now, you’ll notice how “Apr 12, 2009 Orkko Oath acquired item Serene Echoes link” turns into “CHARACTER NAME – [item]ITEMNAME[/item]”

See how that works? Make any changes you want, I know some people might want to change the “-” back to “aquires” or something of that nature. Have fun and make it something unique if you want.

Now, we’ll add our RSS feed to the vBulletin RSS Feed Robot.

1. In the vBulletin Admin Console go to the RSS Feeds category and click RSS Feed Manager.
2. Hit Add New RSS Feed.
3. Title the feed and enter the URL.
4. Put in the username of who you want the posts to be by, could be you, or a dummy account, but it has to0 actually exist.
5. Set the forum that it posts in to the one we created earlier.
6. In both Title Template and Body Template replace everything with “{feed:title}“.
7. Change any other settings you would like, but that is all that is necessary.
8. Press Save and then Run Scheduled Tasks Now.

Go to the page where you added the vBadvanced module. You should now see something like this:

You’re done! Make any changes you want, and post your guild site link in the comments for other to see. You can also post here any questions, comments, or suggestions. I’d love to make this better or more efficent if anyone has any ideas.

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!)