Light-weight related articles mod for sNews 1.7

Here is the next evolution of my related articles/posts/entries mod for sNews CMS. It's very straight forward, all the information needed is contained in the single file, mod.related-light.php.

What exactly does this mod do?
Basically this mod will take the words within the article title as well as the meta keywords and attempt to find closely related articles to present to your visitors... which they will hopefully find useful and stay on your site. You can see it in action at the bottom of this article.

This mod is a lot lighter than my previous beta related articles mod, uses but one MySQL query, and matches title & keywords (if you toggle $match_tags setting to TRUE) against titles, keywords, descriptions, and article text. I will also give a brief install walk through here, so let's get started.

First download the mod zip file here;

VERSION history
[1.0.2] - matches IN BOOLEAN to avoid to 50% threshold
[1.0.1] - corrected category name when displayed
[1.0.0] - initial release

Extract the zip file, modify the variables in the CONFIG section shown below, then upload mod.related-light.php to the same folder as your snews.php file.

/**************************** CONFIG ****************************/
$debug        = 'FALSE'; // toogle to TRUE to print debugging information via comments in the HTML source
$lang_title   = 'Related articles:'; // the title you would like printed out
$use_same_cat = 'FALSE'; // toggle to TRUE to restrict matches to the parent, child or sibling categories
$strict_cat   = 'FALSE'; // toogle this to TRUE to further restrict matches to the EXACT same category, TRUE over-rides use_same_cat
$display_cat  = 'FALSE'; // toggle to TRUE to display the category name in parenthesis beside the matches
$post_limit   = '5'; // Max number of related articles to show
$match_tags   = 'FALSE'; // toggle to TRUE to match meta description keywords also

Now back up your snews.php and work on a copy, within the function articles, look for the following code;

} else if (empty($currentPage)) {
    if ($infoline == true) {
        $tag = explode(',', tags('infoline'));
        foreach ($tag as $tag ) {
            switch ($tag) {
                case 'date':
                    echo $a_date_format;
                    break;
                case 'readmore':
                case 'comments': ;
                    break;
                case 'edit':
                    if (_ADMIN) {
                        echo ' '.$edit_link;
                    }
                    break;
                default:
                    echo $tag;
            }
        }
    } else if (_ADMIN) {
        echo '<p>'.$edit_link.'</p>';
    }
}

and add the following code BELOW it

if ($infoline == true && $_catID != 0) { // displays it only on regular articles (not pages) and only when the article is viewed on it's own page
    include('mod.related-light.php'); 
}

Now set up the full text indexes on your MySQL table if you haven't already.

ALTER TABLE articles ADD FULLTEXT(text, title, keywords_meta, description_meta); 

Now add some .related_posts styles to your stylesheet, something like

div.related_posts {
    margin: 5px  0;
}
ul.related_posts {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
}
ul.related_posts li{
    padding-left:16px;
    margin-bottom:.2em;
    background-image:url('../images/related.png');
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    background-position:0 .2em;
}

Here's the icon I used...... (from pinvoke). That should be it, upload your modified stylesheet and then your modified snews.php and you should be all set.