Read/Unread?

[Smurlos]

Hi All

I was wondering if there was a way that I could make news articles on my homepage be marked at the beginning with "[NEW]" for example, if the user hadn't read the article yet?

The homepage lists the newest 10 articles in subject format at the moment and you click on the subject and it takes you to the page with the whole article.

This works with private messaging as I have a "Read" column which is marked at 0 default which means 'unread' and then when the user reads it, it changes to 1. This works as each message is only addressed to 1 user. But news items aren't addressed to people in particular so by adopting this format, if 1 person read it, it would appear as read to everyone even if they hadn't read it yet.

Was wondering if anyone had any solutions? I'm assuming it'd be cookie based?

Table structures are as follows:

staff_list (staff table)

StaffID - staff ID obviously
Firstname - first name
Surname - surname
ContractedHours - number of hours contracted for as a guide
InitialDeptID - the department ID they were employed in originally (where they appear in the rota)
PayRate - how much they are paid per hour
PIN - pin number for logging in
LastDate - if they are leaving, their last working date
InRota - 0 = not in rota (i.e. dont display on rota) and 1 will show them
BreakPaid - whether to subtract 30 mins or not for working out estimate gross pay.
HolidayHours - number of hours paid when taking a holiday day

bulletin_list (news table)

BulletinID - the news article id
Read_By - list of staffid's who have read seperate by comma
StaffID - staff id of person who posted bulletin
Date - date bulletin was posted
Subject - bulletin subject (appears on homepage)
BulletinText - the article body.

Thanks in advance for any help / ideas anyone can offer

[sneakyimp]

I think the right approach here is to associate a publication date and time with each article and a "last visit" value for each user. when a user views your page and you are looping through the various articles, you add "new" if the publication date is more recent than the last visit.

the last visit concept might be a bit tricky. when a visit returns, you might grab their data record from the db and save the last visit time you find in the db in a cookie or in session. as soon as you've grabbed it, update the database so that last_visit is set to the current time.

as long as the user's session lasts, you will know the time of their previous last visit because it's in session. at the same time, you have already updated the database to record the current visit.