Thread

Just what the title says. The scenario is an online community website powered by EE 1.6.7, and separate SMF forums. I’m wanting to manage a list of links to community pages & sites in EE, and have that EE-managed list appear in the (non-EE) forums.

The SMF forums have a feature that allows this in the other direction, the “SSI.php”, which - when included in an external PHP script - allows access to certain forum stats and data in that external script.

Is there a way to accomplish the same thing with EE?

Hi Michael,

There is no reason that you can’t call an EE template using AJAX for example (assuming that the SMF forums are on the same domain). You can also do something like this in an SMF file:

<?php
$output = file_get_contents("http://myeesite.com/my_template");
//...parse output or whatever you need to do…
echo $output;
?>

Note that you may need to wrap this call in an output buffer.

Does that help?

Cheers

Greg

My way is probably crude, but:

<?
include("http://www.hearth.com/myeesystem/index.php/articles/EEtemplate_to_bring_in");
?>

simply including a EE template using PHP…..in a regular PHP page, works fine.
This call, for instance, puts the most recent forum topics into the unrelated and non-EE front page of my site.

http://www.hearth.com

The EE template you call can have all the calls in it that you need to sort and select your data.

Thanks for the assist, Craig.
Michael, does either Greg’s or Craig’s info help?

My way is probably crude, but:

<?
include("http://www.hearth.com/myeesystem/index.php/articles/EEtemplate_to_bring_in");
?>

simply including a EE template using PHP…..in a regular PHP page, works fine.
This call, for instance, puts the most recent forum topics into the unrelated and non-EE front page of my site.

http://www.hearth.com

The EE template you call can have all the calls in it that you need to sort and select your data.

That really works? Wow, I didn’t even try that due to being sure that the PHP include() was performed at the filesystem level, which would be before Apache processed EE’s index.php as a script. I’ll give that a try - thanks!

That will work on some servers; but many (the majority, I believe) disallow PHP includes with a full URL for security reasons.  It’s worth a try, though!

If that does not work, perhaps using Magpie or SimplePie to parse an RSS feed of the contents? These are both stand-alone PHP scripts that might fit the bill.

Let us know how you get on!

That really works? Wow, I didn’t even try that due to being sure that the PHP include() was performed at the filesystem level, which would be before Apache processed EE’s index.php as a script. I’ll give that a try - thanks!

Works for me - older server and newer (centos now, gentoo before).....but, as Lisa suggests, this might be because I use a dedicated box and have my own settings.

I couldn’t say without making the attempt…if it would work with a relative path.

No, doesn’t seem to work with relative paths…...

As to urls and php, maybe it allows the same url? just not off-site urls?

Try it and see, I guess!

Yep, definitely try it and let us know!  Thanks Craig for all of your help. =)

Well I tried it and it doesn’t work for me - I get the following errors logged to the SMF forums into which I’m trying to include an EE template:

include(): Failed opening ‘http://www.example.com/index.php/includes/top-nav’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear’)

include(http://www.example.com/index.php/includes/top-nav): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found

include(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

Based on that, can someone point me in the right direction for the settings I should ask the server admin to change?

Hi Michael C. (KKCJ),

I believe that this is because of the allow_url_fopen configuration in your php.ini file. That setting will need to be on. Please ask your server admin whether that can be changed.

Cheers

Greg

Yup, showed them this thread and they concurred on the setting. They’re not willing to change that setting for security reasons, however, so I’ve been looking for alternative solutions. Any idea if I should be able to accomplish this using php’s cURL functions?

Michael,

I am going to move this thread to the CodeShare Corner as it is now more appropriate there.

I am not familiar with cURL enough here to give you an example unfortunately

I found some good explanations here and here though

Michael,

I am going to move this thread to the CodeShare Corner as it is now more appropriate there.

I am not familiar with cURL enough here to give you an example unfortunately

I found some good explanations here and here though

Thanks John, those links put me on the path to solving this thing!