[RFC|Rejected] Announcement Feed

[imkingdavid]

Links for reference:
MOD page in the DB - http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/a ... ment_feed/
Discussion topic in 3.2 Discussion area (not started by me) - viewtopic.php?f=105&t=34080
Ticket - http://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-10520

I made a MOD last year that uses phpBB's feed from the Announcements forum to put a listing of the 10 most recent announcements on the front page of the ACP. I feel that such a feature would be a nice addition for those admins who do not visit phpBB.com regularly, as it would let them know about what is happening with phpBB.

Some things that aren't in the MOD that could also be added are configuration options, such as number of news to show, placement (i.e. main ACP page top or bottom, system tab, etc.), the ability to specify another feed URL (for foreign support site announcement forums and such), and other things that I'm not thinking of.

Thoughts/Ideas?

[DavidIQ]

Does your MOD use the RSS feed to serve up the info? Can't remember. If it does then it sounds like it would be a nice addition.

[imkingdavid]

Here is the code at the GitHub repo: https://github.com/imkingdavid/ACP-Announcement-Feed

All it does is takes the RSS or Atom feed (whichever it is) and displays it on the page as is shown in the screenshot on the MOD page.

[callumacrae]

With an option to disable this, I like the idea!

[Meis2M]

very good idea. its can come to 3.1 too.
there is similar system in wordpress. with this tools. admins can see new News and new patch or security problem of phpBB

[bantu]

Considering that phpBB can be used without the english language, I'd say that directly including content from phpBB.com into phpBB core does not make sense. It works for the version check because that is just language-independent data.

[Oleg]

I am not a huge fan of this idea. New versions of phpbb are already checked via the version checker. Stuff like support toolkit is only needed when something breaks, the rest of the time I can't imagine people caring too much about its releases. Quickinstall is used by mod authors, they would track its releases already and everyone else I don't think cares. Announcements concerning phpbb downtime - how useful are they to board owners?

Looking at download counts of the top 5 mods (viewtopic.php?f=84&t=32805&start=30#p220515) they are in the 32k - 45k range. Announcement feed mod only has 2k downloads, suggesting it is not a widely needed feature.

[imkingdavid]

I am not a huge fan of this idea. New versions of phpbb are already checked via the version checker. Stuff like support toolkit is only needed when something breaks, the rest of the time I can't imagine people caring too much about its releases. Quickinstall is used by mod authors, they would track its releases already and everyone else I don't think cares. Announcements concerning phpbb downtime - how useful are they to board owners?

Looking at download counts of the top 5 mods (viewtopic.php?f=84&t=32805&start=30#p220515) they are in the 32k - 45k range. Announcement feed mod only has 2k downloads, suggesting it is not a widely needed feature.

3/5 of those MODs came out 3 years ago. Mine came out last year. While no it's not getting the same ratio of clicks, that doesn't mean it's not a feature that people like.

[Oleg]

While I did comment on the pull request I rather don't want to merge this into the core package.

(14:22:08) bantu: nn-: you saw https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb3/pull/49 ... nt-3091414 ?
(14:24:18) nn-: yep
(14:24:45) nn-: but https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb3/pull/49 ... nt-3091942
(14:25:07) nn-: which if that is true moves me from a weak -1 to a 0
(14:27:32) bantu: this should be an extension IMO
(14:27:49) bantu: admin should first pick the feed(s) they want
(14:27:50) nn-: that's what i was thinking
(14:28:27) bantu: this also leaks usage data of the ACP to phpBB.com
(14:28:30) nn-: do we have a policy of always injecting globals into new code?
(14:28:53) nn-: well, so does versioncheck
(14:29:16) bantu: well yeah, but that is cached
(14:29:26) bantu: could cache the feed content too I guess
(14:29:39) bantu: still not liking it for the earlier reasons

Ideally this should be an extension that admins opt-in into.

[imkingdavid]

Ideally this should be an extension that admins opt-in into.

Fair enough. I just figured from the amount of support I had received that it might be a nice addition. At least I got some more experience with the coding guidelines and using git and such. How do I delete a pull request?