Topic: Adding forum post updates to website homepage.

[domystevens]

Hi,

I'm just setting up a forum and I posted in the Simple Machines Forum about adding a box to my website homepage (which is a standalone website, not connected to any forum software) which shows the latest posts from a particular board in my forum.

What I'm trying to do on my site is currently being done on the Simple Machines homepage http://www.simplemachines.org/ on the right where it says 'Latest News' and shows the latest posts from the news section of their forum. That is essentially what I want on my homepage.

I was told to use Simple Portal which I have subsequently downloaded and I've also read some of the documentation however I can't workout how to do what I want as described above, or if it's even possible with Simple Portal.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dom

[oNLy1]

You don't need the SimplePortal mod to what you want.
All you need is to use is ssi recent posts

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/ssi_examples.php

You may or may not want to use SimplePortal for the "main" part of your website, but in the end having the "main" part of the website being able to connect (with ease) to the forum helps in the long run.

Using SP might be a replacement for what you currently have, maybe not depending on how much you already have on the site.

I recently converted 2 years worth of Joomla content into SP when I installed the forum because in the long run having SimplePortal + SMF was always going to be compatible, where as Joomla and SMF have already had conflicting © policies.

[AngelinaBelle]

As oNLy1 says, there is more than one way to achieve your goal.

With Simple Portal, you would use a boardnews block on a standalone portal page, which must be in the same domain (though it can be in a different subdomain).  You could get a lot of help right here to set something like that up.

If a standalone Simple Portal page does not work for you, then you might wind up simply creating the "home page" for your website as a php page, with a call to the exact same SSI functions that Simple Portal uses in the boardnews block.  For that, you could get pretty rapid response on the correct board at Simplemachines.org.

[domystevens]

Thanks very much oNLy1 and AngelinaBelle. In the end I've decided to just use a simple RSS feed as it gets the job done and isn't too complicated!

Thanks!

[AngelinaBelle]

You are right.  That is simple, and if it has what you need, it is perfect for you.
When you need more complicated stuff, you'll know where to find us!