How to make a comment box?

sovereign

Hey guys,

I have a news script that displays the news on my homepage, and I want to create a comment script that goes along with each news entry. I can't really think of the most efficient way to tackle this problem.

Some ways that I've thought about are:

Having an extra column in my MySQL table and using the just have the comments appended upon each other into one long text entry.
Having a seperate MySQL table and somehow storing the comments there in accordance with the date that the comments belong to.

thorpe

the easiest way would be to create a new table comments, in it you would store the id of the news item + the comment itself. then to retrieve the comments for a particular news item you would query the table by the news items id. eg

SELECT comment FROM comments WHERE newsID = 4;

cool?

sovereign

thorpe: How would you suggest that the comments be stored in the new table? Would you store all the comments under 1 field or split each comment up into its own column.

thorpe

why would you ever try and store them in one field? its actually harder to do than inserting a new row for each comment, and it eliminates the whole point of a database by making it nearly impossible to query for just one comment.

ive no idea what your talking about really.

sovereign

thorpe: would you then suggest that each news entry gets its own table for comments?

hurricane

How about making a new table for the comments. Then make some kind of identifier that will link the comments to the article. Say, adding a new column to the news table that will hold "0" for the first article, "1" for the next article, ect. The for each comment about that news article, there will be a field that will have that same number that corresponds to the news article. That way you can use an SQL statement to "SELECT * FROM Comments WHERE num=0". Then you can have them sorted by date and be able to pull them from the table without hassle. Just my thoughts.