A little help before I bury myself in trial and error after error after error

[LiamBailey]

Hi folks, long time no hear.

I know Laserlight is going to kill me as I have already asked a similar question, but i still haven;t got round to putting into action her solution and now I have deleted the email with the link to it and I want to do a similar thing for a different function, but I will definitely be doing this.

I run a blog on my website, currenyl I create a new html page for every post manually. But I want to start putting my posts into my MySql and pulling them out onto the blog page. For a start I am well rusty as I have been learning about Java lately, so please tell me if I ham supposted to have brackets round my query's and inside or outside the quotes

So I would do after the connection which I'm okay with,

I would put this before even the html

<? $mysql_query = "SELECT * FROM the_db ORDER BY ID DESC";
$nrows = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query);
?>

I just need to know how to select the most recent post.

Maybe:

<?
$post_pull = "SELECT FROM the_db WHERE ID = $nrows";
$post = mysql_fetch_array(post_pull);
$post_pull2 = "SELECT FROM the_db WHERE ID = $nrows-1";
$_post2= mysql_fetch_array(post_pull2);?>

for the Headline
<div id="posthead">
<? echo $post['title']; ?>
</div>
<div id="postbody">
<? echo $post['body'] not sure about how to have page breaks in the db and bring them out onto the page?>
</div> and so on.

Links in the side bar would be

<a href="<?$post_pull2?>">Post Title

Oh no, I just realized, the above won't work. I need to know how to do it by id, how to find out the highest id number. My brain is fried thinking about how to do this, I hope someone can point me in the right direction, I have built up a fair bit of PHP knowledge, I don't want someone to write my code for me as I enjoy it, just offer me one or two ways that would help me achieve what I want to do, I'm sure it must be one of the most common codes ever used.

Thanks in advance.

[rulian]

to find your newest entry, you should have in your database schema a date - time field, or at least an autoincrement ID field in your database.
If you do, you can tell mysql to get new blogs, order them by date DESC (meaning newest first) and LIMIT 1, which would return the newest posting
You can oder the auto increment ID as well, but that could cause inconsistencies so I would go by date

a sql would look like

$SQL=mysql_query("SELECT * from `mytable` ORDER BY `datefield` DESC LIMIT 1");

if you were to then go $Info=mysql_fetch_assoc($SQL);
you would have an Array $Info with all your blog info in it

Also, i would get into the habbit of not using shorthands like <?$var?> as it causes portability issues, go <?PHP echo $var; ?>

[LiamBailey]

I am okay with displaying the most recent post my main problem is how to make it display links to the other recent posts in the sidebar, and how to make the right post display in the content when the links are clicked

[LiamBailey]

Having thought about it again, maybe I can use <a href="<?PHP_SELF?>" and add a query string for post_1, post_2 etc, if someone can just tell me how to access a query string that hasn't came from a GET request, from within my script I'm laughing

[LiamBailey]

oh and how to set one