Guestbook-posts with different colors

chataqua

At the moment I'm designing a new web-page for personal use.
Everything is OK, but I thought it would be cool having a guestbook where the first post has a white-colored background, the second post a grey-colored background, the third white again and so on...

Now, I don't know how to do this, but I've seen it working on different pages. Could anyone help me with this?? It would be pretty cool, and it would fitt into my design as well....

nnichols

You need to use the modulus operator to establish whether it is an odd or even numbered row and then apply the colour appropriately -

$db = mysql_connect('host','user','pass');
$sql = "some SELECT statement";
$res = mysql_query($sql, $db) or die('MySQL error: ' . mysql_error() . '<br>Query: ' . $sql);

echo '<table>';
for ($i=0; $i<mysql_num_rows($res); $i++) {
$row = mysql_fetch_row($res);
$color = ($i%2==0) ? '#FFFFFF' : '#C0C0C0';
echo '<tr bgcolor="'.$color.'"><td>'.$row[0].'</td></tr>';
}

echo '</table>';

Hope this helps 😉

chataqua

Isn't it a way to do this without using MySQL??
My problem is that on my webserver (I'm using my brother-in-laws server, and I can't have MySQL without dealing username and password with him, and he doesn't want to...) I can't have SQL, so all I really look for, is flatfile-stuff...
While I'm speaking, does anyone have a self-teaching PHP-book here in either html or PDF??

xblue

this is not restricted to mysql, it is always the same.

the entries will be displayed in some kind of loop. if it is a for loop, you've already got an internal counter. else, e.g. in a while loop, you'd need to increment an internal counter in the loop.

then you can use this counter to set the background color as in nnichols example ($i being the internal counter):

$color = ($i%2==0) ? '#FFFFFF' : '#C0C0C0';
echo '<tr bgcolor="'.$color.'"><td>'.$entry.'</td></tr>';

this means: if it can evenly be devided by 2 (which obviously would be the case in every second row) use the first color, else the second).