Code Snippet: Display news items, anywhere

[WebBird]

Do you use "return" to return the content, or just the call? The call does an "echo", what's not what you're after when using a droplet.

[Harry P.]

Just the call, as shown in my code quote.

What would the droplet syntax look like with a return?

[WebBird]

You will have to "catch" the output with ob_start()... etc and return it.

[WebBird]

Try:

Code:

$output = NULL;
if (function_exists('displayNewsItems')) {
   ob_start();
   displayNewsItems(
       $group_id = 2,
       $max_news_items = 10,
       $max_news_length = -1,
       $display_mode = 1,
       $lang_id = 'auto',
       $strip_tags = true,
       $allowed_tags = '<p><a><img>',
       $custom_placeholder = false,
       $sort_by = 1,
       $sort_order = 1,
       $not_older_than = 0
   );
   $output = ob_get_clean();
}
return $output;

You may set $output to something else but NULL, if you wish to print out an error message if the Anynews call fails, for example.

Edit: Fixed code.

[Harry P.]

Thanks! But...

I copied your code 1:1 to a droplet, but when used on a page, it doesn't return anything....

[WebBird]

Woops, sorry, it's ob_get_clean(), not ob_end_clean().

[Harry P.]

Ah, now it's working. Thanks a lot, WebBird!

[seagull]

@WebBird

Maybe i overlooked it, but when i use displayanynews with displaymode=2(only the newstitle as link) and having newsitems with only shorttext the resulting page displays the longtext wich is empty, so only the header and the footer are displayed.
Am i doing something wrong or is this the way the snippet should work?(only with long text)

It's not Anynews that causing this but the newsmodule itself.

For now i modified view.php(at line 450) of the news so that if the $post_long is empty the $post_short is printed otherwise the $post_long should be printed.

thanks, Jan

[WebBird]

Ah. I misunderstood "resulting page". You meant the page Anynews links to, right? You can open a bug ticket for the news module if you wish. But take a look if it is an already known problem before opening a ticket.

[tiesy]

I have more pages (and sections) with the module News. But I use not Groups by News module.

How can I use Anynews to display newsitems from certain pages or section?
How can I change the code?

More thanks!

This is easy to solve: You have to relace "$group_id" to "$page_id" on every position of the snippet. Tools like "InfoRapid Suchen & Ersetzen" will do this in a few seconds. If you don´t want to overwrite the original-snippet, simply rename it in the info.php to something like "anypagenews".