One of the many questions I get asked by other website developers is how do I post news on the main page with icons. My method was to build a mysql table with the information for the icons I wanted. As you will see in the News Icons control panel, I have the ability to add news icons. The form allows me to not only upload the image I want to use but it also sets an entry into my database. I use the thread’s Topic Description as a way of deciding what icon to use. So if the description was TechGear News it would know to use the TechGear News icon that I set in the database. Here is a picture of the news icon control panel.

Now to make the process of posting news and making sure I set the right text for the icon, I built a small form. The form includes a dropdown list of all the different identifiers to use in the topic description. The dropdown list pulls the info from the database table I created so when a new one is added it is automatically included in the list. The form is a popup that you can access from techgear’s main page if you have the proper rights. This is a picture of the form.

Here you enter the topic, text, source, and icon to use. It also includes some basic bbcode functions if needed. The form also uses a bit of IPB SDK in order to easily create the post. Once you have filled out the form you click submit and the popup will close and the site will refresh to show the latest article.

I hope that helps out other users that are looking to do something similar.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.