Easy forum message dump via RSS?

I want to have an announcments section that is a normal part of the forum.  I just want to pull the message of the most recent announcments to the front page, and thought I'd use an RSS parser to do it.  Maybe a simple query change, and some formatting in the extern.php module would do it.

Though this is in the wrong section, perhaps, I'm also trying figure out a simple way for the user to add an expiration date to an announcment. I could add a field very easily/  But everytime I think about coding a calendar form for the user to enter the date correctly from a forum posting, I get a headache.

I've pretty have a calendar plugin for punBB, but it's really not integrated except for the common login/logout.  The nice part of the plugin is that the only changes to stock punBB code is to include a $pun_root variable in some other scripts so that the references in the base punBB files don't get messed when they are called from outside the base directory. If I get happy with it, I'll put it somewhere for others to take a look at it.  I also made a couple of minor database changes.

I really like this board.  If I can get the calendar integrated the way I want, I'll be able to use it for what I'm trying to do.

PEB

I got the topics fine.  I just wanted to add the message content, rather than the topics to the front page.

Yep, there's lots of javascript calendars, but integrating them into the posting form seems like something I won't have the time to tackle now.

PEB