Help with coding a blog

DBHostS

Hello,

So far everything is working great, i have a newpost.php page for posting new topics. A blog.php for showing blog topics with a preview of the article and a link to the main article/comments which is comments.php. in comments.php it shows the full article any comments if any and then a form to post new comments.

I also added a categories section under blog.php?page=categories printing out all the categories and the posts in each one.

here is my question.

how do i make it so it will only print out, lets say 10 posts on blog.php and then have a link at the bottom like so:

<a href='blog.php?page=2'> Next-> </a>

here is my code for getting the blog posts from the database. right now i am just taking out the first 30.

<?
$q = "Select *,DATE_FORMAT(date_posted,'%W,%d %b %Y') as thedate FROM rms_blog_article INNER JOIN rms_blog_categories ON categoryID=catid WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30 DAY)AND artchild='0' ORDER BY date_posted DESC LIMIT 10 ";

$result = $database->query($q);
$num = mysql_num_rows($result);

if($num > 0){
									while($row_articles = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){

           /**
           * CODE THAT PRINTS OUT ARTCLE.
           */


             }
}else{

echo '<div class="article">
            <div align="center"><p>There are no articles available at present</p></div>
          </div>';

}


?>

If anyone could help me and point me into the right direction that would be great!

i know i am going to have to edit my while loop or add another one. just need a little advice.

Thanks in advance

theslinky

Use a variable to store the page number requested and modify your SQL query to pull up results in that range. So at the top of your code add the following:

$page = $_GET['page'];
// you may want to use regular expressions to check if $page is really a number
$pagelimit = 10; // in case you want to change the # of articles per page in the future

Change the end of your SQL query to this:

$q = "... ORDER BY date_posted DESC LIMIT " . (($page - 1) * $pagelimit) . ",{$pagelimit}";

So if $page is 1, then we are setting the LIMIT range to 0,10 (start at record 0, pull up 10 records). If $page is 2, then LIMIT is 10,10 (start at record 10, pull up 10 records).

In order to find out how many total records you have you can use COUNT in SQL...

$q = "Select COUNT(*) AS numrecords FROM rms_blog_article INNER JOIN rms_blog_categories ON categoryID=catid WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 30 DAY)AND artchild='0'";
$result = $database->query($q);
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($result);
$numrecords = $row['numrecords'];
$numpages = ceil ($numrecords / $pagelimit);

Now you can use $page and the $numpages variable to find out whether there is a "prev" and/or a "next" page...

if ($page > 1) {
// Code to print the prev page link
print "<a href=\"blog.php?page=" . ($page - 1) . "\">Previous Page</a>";
}

if ($page < $numpages) {
// Code to print the next page link
print "<a href=\"blog.php?page=" . ($page + 1) . "\">Next Page</a>";
}

trevorsg

This is called "pagination". You can add the LIMIT keyword to your SQL syntax to only select a certain number of records. This is quite a big topic, so I'm not going to explain how to do it, but you should Google "pagination" or watch my buddy's course on creating a blog with PHP ($15). He covers pagination, along with MVC, pretty URLs, WYSIWYG editors, etc. Highly recommended.

DBHostS

thanks for the replies.. after i posted this i searched php paging... found what i was looking for.

i will look over all examples to find the way i will do this.

Thanks again.