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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One, 4th EditionSams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One, 4th Edition

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One, 4th EditionSams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One, 4th Edition

Learn More Buy

Summary

To take an idea from inception through to fruition, you should follow a design process. This process essentially says, "Think before you act." Discuss rules, requirements, and objectives; then create the final version of your normalized tables.

In this chapter, you saw how forums are hierarchical in nature—forums contain topics; topics contain posts. You can’t have a topic without a post, and posts don’t exist in forums without belonging to a topic. You applied this knowledge to the creation of tables to hold forum topics and posts, and used PHP scripts to create the input and display pages for these items.

Q&A

Q:What if I want multiple forums? This sequence assumes that only one forum is available.

A: If you want to have multiple forums in your discussion board, create a table called forums (or something to that effect) containing fields for an ID, name, and perhaps a forum description. Then, in the forum_topics and forum_posts tables, add a field called forum_id so that these elements lower in the hierarchy are tied to the master forum. Be sure to amend the SQL queries for record insertion to account for the value of the forum_id.

Next, instead of starting your display at the topic level, begin it at the forum level. Just as you created a script to display topics, create a script to show the forums. The link to the forum display would contain the forum_id, and the page itself would show all the topics within that forum.

Workshop

The workshop is designed to help you anticipate possible questions, review what you’ve learned, and begin putting your knowledge into practice.

Quiz

  1. How is the topic ID value passed to the showtopic.php script?

  2. What else, besides telling the user that the topic was successfully added, could we do at the end of the do_addtopic.php script?

Answers

  1. Through the $_GET superglobal, named as the the value of $_GET["topic_id"].

  2. Just as with the replytopost.php script, we could eliminate the message display and simply redirect the user to the topic she just created, showing the new topic and post in all its glory.

Activity

You’ll notice that none of these pages are really tied together with any sort of navigation. Take these basic framework scripts and apply some navigational flow to them. Make sure that users can always add a topic or return to the topic list from any given page, for example.

If you’re feeling really ambitious, use the information provided in the Q&A section to integrate and display multiple forums into your tidy little discussion board.

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