Good day people of the forum. I am trying to improve on my php knowledge. I am trying to make my own blog so I can practice various things. I have an early site that I'm testing things on here. what I want to be able to do is create dynamic urls so I can show individual entries or all comments for an entry without having to create a new page every time. I can already add entries to the database and have that working as I want. Whenever I search for a good tutorial I can't really find what I want. can anyone help or guide me to somewhere useful?

 

Thanks

Hi Mark,

One way to create a "dynamic" page is to use a variable in your URL ... I'll just show a quick example:

 

URL : website/page.php

Page loads normally ... nothing fancy so far.

 

URL : website/page.php?show_comments=1

A lot of possibilities (let's just say that the page loads normally + plus some comments show up) ... here's some code:

 

	 //this is were the page loads normally

//check to see if show_comments is set
if ( isset( $_GET('show_comments') ) )
{
 //variable is set -- you'd probably want to check that your variable is an integer and it's equal to 1
 if ( is_int( $_GET('show_comments') ) && $_GET('show_comments') == 1 )
 {
	 //this is were you could do a lot of stuf ... show some comments ?
  }
}

 

Notice that in this situation I'm not even using an else statement (if show_comments is 1 comments will show up .. otherwise .. they don't).

 

Showing individual entries (blog posts for example) takes a similar approach with URL : website/post.php?post_id=NUMBER.

You can have multiple variables in your URL too: post.php?post_id=3&show_comments=1

 

I hope this is what you were asking for.

Cheers

Thanks. Would I need to connect to the database and the table first above that code?

Thanks. Would I need to connect to the database and the table first above that code?

You can for example include a php script (at the top of the scripts that need a db connection) that connects to mysql and selects the database (i usually have only 1 database per website).

 

Running specific queries (like selecting the comments) you'd do after the check (if needed that is). In the previous example that would be here:

//this is were you could do a lot of stuf ... show some comments ?

 

P.S. Sorry for the late reply.

sorry to be an idiot but I'm still not really getting it. This is what I have, it's probably really wrong.

<?php 
$page_title = 'The List';
include ('./php/header.php');
?>

<h2>Latest Updates</h2>
<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","******","******");
if (!$con)
 {
 die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
 }

mysql_select_db("roondog_news", $con);

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM listnews");

if ( isset( $_GET('storynum') ) )


    if ( is_int( $_GET('storynum') ) && $_GET('storynum') == 1 )
    {
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
 echo "<div class='info'>";
 echo "<h3>".$row['challenge']."</h3><h4>".$row['published']."</h4>".$row['story'];
 echo "<p><a href='".$row['challenge_link']."'>View Challenge</a></p>";
 echo "<p><a href='".$row['challenge_link']."/#comment'>Add Comment</a> | <a href='#nogo'>View Comments (".$row['comments_no'].")</a></p>";
 echo "</div>";  
 }
}
}
mysql_close($con);
?>

<?php
include ('./php/footer.html');
?>

 

I got it done, it makes me so happy when I get things sorted. It was the wrong type of brackets after $GET.

I've also changed it a little. Thanks for the help.