A couple problems I need help with

BlueSun

Background info:
A friend made me this php script for news entries on my website. My friends been busy and feeling bad latley, so he doesn't feel like working on it.

So I figured, how hard could this be? I coded the rest of the site from scratch (with the exception of the forum) its just a few errors...

Problem:

Ok, so the reason I'm here, I have a few things I need to work out and I have no idea how to do it.

the first is that users (and myself) are able to post blank messages, how can I stop that? (its probably pretty easy isn't it?)

The next thing, is where users can view the comments, the comments are in a messed up order, I used to think that the comments were just in acceding order, but then it inserts the comment like right in between two previous comments

The last thing (for now) is the time, I think I recall something about being able to set the time zone, which is what I guess I need to do since when I make a news entry, its the wrong time on the post, and I go into my database to change it to the correct time... so I need to fix that as well...

another thing, although not a priority, was that I wanted to be able to insert smilies into posts...

I look foward to the help

thorpe

the first is that users (and myself) are able to post blank messages, how can I stop that? (its probably pretty easy isn't it?)

You need to check the length of the posted message before inserting it to the database. eg:

if (strlen($_POST['msg']) < 1) {
    // display a message saying you need to fill in the message field
}

the comments are in a messed up order

You need to make sure your database table has a timestamp field, and order by that, not by id.eg:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM messages ORDER BY stamp DESC";

The last thing (for now) is the time

The timestamp in your database runs on server time, so if your server is in a different timezone than you, well, it will be different. You can use the [man]date/man function to both format the look of your dataes, aswell as subtract and add hours to the time.

Without seeing any code, this is about all the help I can offer. Hope you get the idea.

Edit: Oh, as for smilies. Its not too difficult to impliment, but you might be best having a look at somewhere like hotscripts.com to see if there is something already made that you could use, or at least get the idea from.

Good luck.

BlueSun

Ok I think this helps, where do I insert these lines of code?

like for the stopping blank messages, do I insert it before the code for the comment box?

same for the order by thing

P.S. thanks for baring with me, I'm very much new to PHP

thorpe

Those snippets aren't ready to go, there just examples. Lets look at one problem at a time. Post your code that inserts a new message into the database.

BlueSun

I'm not sure exactly what it is.... I think its:

function post_comment($sql, $template) {
	$query = "SELECT * FROM comments WHERE id = '" . $_SESSION['commentid'] . "'";

$result = $sql->query($query);

$rows = $sql->num_rows($result);

$commentid = $_SESSION['commentid'];
$comments = $rows + 1;

$query = "INSERT INTO comments VALUES ('" . $commentid . "', '" . $_ENV['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "', '" . $_POST['name'] . "', '" . $_POST['comment'] . "', '" . date('Ymd') . "', '" . date('h:i:s') . "')";
$result = $sql->query($query);