Coding a Nested PHP Forum

rlafountain

I want to code my own nested forum for my website.

What I know is this:
The database will be made up of two tables, discussions and posts. The posts will have a parent. The discussions will have a first post that is a member of the posts table.

I want to be able to reply to any of the posts ie if you reply to the first post you can reply again to the first post or to the second post and it nests accordingly.
Basically I am having trouble using the loops and such to accomplish this.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan

thorpe

there is a great article here that deals with creating trees of data.

hope it helps.

leatherback

Hi,

It looks like you need a recursive function. This function below does what you need, but then for a nested menu structure.

Hope you get the logic behind it..



$menuquery = "select * from $menu_table order by M_sortorder";
   $result=mysql_query($menuquery) or die('An error occured retrieving data');
   $listing = Array();
   while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
     { 
     $listing["$row[M_page_nr]"] = array("This_id" =>  $row[M_page_nr], 
                        "parent_id" => $row[M_p_nr],    

                        "category_title" =>  $row[M_label], 
                        "link" => $row['M_link']);
     }


function display_tree($parent, $level, $array, $arr)
  {
  foreach ($array AS $node)
    {

if($node[parent_id] == $parent)  //The parent of page in array matches current parent
  {                              // and this page is a child of the parent

  $indent1 = "";
  $indent2 = "";
  for($i = 0; $i <= $level; $i++) 
    {
    $indent1 .= "  &nbsp; ";
    $indent2 .= "-";
    }
  $oneup = $level+1;
  $html .= "
  $indent1 <input name=\"editable\" type=\"radio\" value=\"$node[This_id]\">$indent2 $node[category_title]<br>
  ";
  $html .= display_tree($node[This_id], $oneup, $array, $arr);  // find more children of parent
  }
}

  return $html;

  } // end function display list


// Now use it
$pageslist = display_tree($startlevel, 0, $listing, $arr);

rlafountain

I am still stuck, but thanks for the help so far.

This is what I have:

$childstr = '';

function print_children_recur($post_id){
$level = 0;

$sql = "SELECT * FROM forum_posts WHERE parent='$post_id'";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
	$this_post_id = $row['post_id'];

	$childstr .= $level.print_one_post($this_post_id);

	$level++;
	print_children_recur($this_post_id);
}

return $childstr;

}

If this seems simple and not correct please help.

Thanks,
Ryan