What I do is this, read the RSS feed of the forum:
http://forum.phpvms....ype=forums&id=1
Replace that with your URL, and the id=1 is the id of the forum.
Then the code (you can see in the dashboard), I use in phpVMS is:
$file = new CodonWebService();
$contents = $file->get("YOUR URL HERE");
$feed = simplexml_load_string($contents);
$contents = '';
$i = 1;
$count = 5; // Show the last 5
foreach ($feed->channel->item as $news) {
$news_content = (string )$news->description;
$date_posted = str_replace('-0400', '', (string )$news->pubDate);
// YOU CAN CUSTOMIZE THIS
$contents .= "<div class=\"newsitem\">
<b>{$news->title}</b> <br />{$news_content}
<br /><br />
Posted: {$date_posted}
</div>";
if ($i++ == $count)
break;
}
}
// ECHO THE HTML
echo $contents;
I elected to go that route because the databases are different, I don't want to open another connection.
You can also cache this, which I'm going to add the code to do right now in the next beta