Forum Moderators: coopster
Basically am customising a CMS to produce a blog-like output. There is no way with this CMS to integrate comments, but that's ok, I have set up a separate comments DB, which stores comments based on the URL of the post page (permalink) which works fine.
I have it all pretty much sorted, except for pulling the number of comments on a given post from a comments table to display with headlines in archives etc.
I am doing it with individual posts as follows:
$sqlquery = "SELECT * FROM $table WHERE href = '/example/example.php'";
$result = mysql_query($sqlquery);
$number = mysql_numrows($result);
$i = 0;
if ($number < 1) {
print "No Comments";
}
else {
if ($number > $i) {
print "Comments ($number)";
$i++;
}
}
?>
This is easy, as I can get the CMS to print the href value to the page.
But am not sure how to do it when there are multiple headline on a page and thus multiple href entries to get from the table. Somehow I don't think including that whole thing beneath each headline is necessary or efficient - or is it?
Thanks
$sqlquery = "SELECT COUNT(*) AS count, href FROM $table GROUP BY href";
$result = mysql_query($sqlquery);
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
then in $row['count'] you will have the number of comments for each $row['href']
When $row[$href] is not set (!isset($row['/example/example.php']) then number of comments is 0.
Hope this helps
Michal
Maybe I didn't explain it well.
The posts and headlines are managed by a CMS which outputs actual physical pages, that is to say they are not retrieved from a database as and when requested by the user, they exist on the server. There is no MySql database involved, data is stored in flat text.
I want it this way - the choice is totally deliberate. The output pages have PHP extensions and it is easy to add PHP functionality to the various templates that generate them.
The form for submitting comments (which is included on individual post pages) grabs the url of the page it is on, and stores this along with each comment and its associated user info etc in a single row in a table of a databse.
I can retrieve the information I want easily when there is just a single post on a page, my difficulty is figuring out how to do it when it is a page with a variable number of headlines, which are not generated by the comments DB.
Obviously I can identify the url of the post to which each headling links - and it is this information which I need to use to retrieve the number of relevant comments from the DB and display them with the headline.
Sorry to go on so lengthily - it's hard to explain :(
You can select from different databases in one query.
But only the comments are in a database.
Can't you hook the php code you posted into each headline?
Yes, but I was sort of hoping there was a way that didn't require so many queries.
The logic I am thinking might work goes like this, but I have no idea where to start to turn this into PHP - I just need a pointer in the right direction and I may be able to figure it out.
1. get the the number of comments in the table for each unique url in the column 'href'.
2. Identify each unique url in the table and (somehow) make each a variable
3. Assign the appropriate number of comments as a value to the relevant variable
So, I would end up with something like:
$page-one = 0
$another-page = 2
$third-page = 6
$this-page = 3
etc
Then after each headline I could just print the appropriate value and it could all be done with a single DB connection.
The page names have no particular logic - they are manually entered, usually as two words separated by a hyphen. So they aren't numeric - eg post-1, post-2, post-3 etc. Plus they are stored with their .php extension, which I would have to strip away.
Maybe I won't bother - it's starting to make my head burst. But thanks for your help so far.
