More than one page for content

Sharif

I've come across lots of sites that display items where you can choose to view the next page, but still remain on the same page... confused yet? Let me show you what I mean.

I click on a link to read Review A. On the page for Review A, It shows a part of the review, and below the text, it shows:

Page 2 >>

You click on that and it's like it refreshes the page with the rest of the story and then in place where "Page 2 >>" was, it now has:

<< Page 1 :: Page 3 >>

And so forth... you get what I mean? How do they do this and still use only ONE page to display more than one?

cgraz

have a look here: http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10219415

Cgraz

Sharif

CGraz,

Thanks for the reply. I think that code you made only works for listing results - which is not what I am trying to do now. If you could please go to http://teamxbox.com/view_reviews.php?id=457, you will see that, that review has been divided into three pages. How? And how can I do that?

Pig

It's called pagination. Look in the coding forum. There is a bookmarked thread.

Sharif

I don't think any of us understands... 😃. In my sql table, I have ONE field that holds the whole review. When I output it, how the heck will PHP split it into three pages?

Zack

try this:

split the review into three parts (3 pages)... and each part is a different field of the table

then... use if statements:

if ($part=1) { }
elseif ($part=2) { }
else ($part=3) { }

and inside the "{ }", do a sql query to get each part...

then the link where all the code is may be called review.php

to link to each part, go to: review.php?part=2
(that would take you to the page with part 2)

Pig

Ah... Usually they have separate fields in the database.

You could try some kind of strlen() trick, but that is not the standard design.

They usually have sections that they follow, instead of page lengths.

cgraz

I agree with pig. If you were to use that approach, you 'could' use substr(), but if you look at the sites that do what you want, you'll notice they are split into sections or ideas, and always end on them. If you were to use substr(), what guarantee would you have that you're ending on the end of a sentence? It would require to much work to get it to work properly; it would be much easier to just split it up into sections.

Cgraz

Sharif

So what do you recommend? I have a field for each page? How can I get all three to display on the same page with PREVIOUS/NEXT links?

cgraz

I think someone mentioned this earlier, but you pass a variable up in the url.

So your links

<a href="thispage.php?section=1">Previous</a>

Then on your page, run an if statement

if((!$_GET['section']) || ($_GET['section'] == '1')) {
   $query = mysql_query("SELECT.. . .") // for section 1
} elseif($_GET['section'] == '2') {
   $query = mysql_query("SELECT.. . .") // for section 2
} // etc etc

Cgraz

Sharif

How would I set the default page? Say in the URL there is no ?variable=value after the page.

Pig

if(!isset($page))
{ $page=1; }

Sharif

hmm... too simple ... feeling stupid now... thanks everyone.

leatherback

You place an other bit of code:

The whole thing should work like this:


if (! isset($_GET['section']))
  {
  $section =1 ;
  }
else
  {
  $section = $_GET['section'];
  }

   $query = mysql_query("SELECT * from table where section = $section");

this first checks wether an section has been parsed. If not, it creates the var $section, and gives it value 1. Else the submitted value is used. The you get the query to get your section from the database.

GilesGuthrie

I would embed some special code in the article text where I wanted the page breaks. Then I would retrieve the WHOLE article, and explode() it, using the special code as the search string. Then, using the array that explode() generates, plus the URL argument, I would echo the correct portion of the array.