Forums

hey, first off thanks to kode monkey for helping me with the php highlight...and mostly dlhouston whos been answering 99% of my questions =]...i built a forum script yet im having trouble writing a function on displaying the latest poster and amount of topics for a certain forum...any suggestions on how i can go about doing this...if you want to see my code i can gladly post it =]..thx again...prob will take a long time until someone answers

I don't know how your forums were made, but I'll assume that you have MySQL as your DB.

If that's the case, you could use a couple of extra queries in your code...

select count(id) from posts group by forum

This would be to show how many posts are there for each forum

select description, user, postDateTime from posts where forum=$criteria order by postDateTime desc limit 1

This would be to show the last post from that specific forum.

The way you should use this examples may vary depending how is your current code, but hopefully this could be a start point to determine what you have to do.

Hope it helps.

MG

the thing is i have 3 separate tables for each forums topics and posts....how do i carry the id to display the topic # and etc

You could use some JOIN, but the easiest way is to use several tables in the same query like this:

select b.description, b.user, a.postDateTime
from posts a, threads b
where a.forum=$criteria
and a.ID=b.postID
order by postDateTime desc
limit 1


It may have not sense, because I don't know your tables, but hopefully you can deduct how to use more than one table in your query.

1.- Select the fields and tell the query which table is each field from
2.- Use alias for the tables to make it easier
3.- Tell the query what is the field that links the two tables

gahh thats a mouth full