----------------------------------- Leftover Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:46 pm PHP / MySQL Noob need's some help with News! ----------------------------------- Well I've tried several tutorials online and none of them are working for me. The company I worked with (Web Development Firm) recently went under before I got to learn the jist of PHP and MySQL and such. I am basically working on a page for a local band here, and I need a news page. I want to make a MySQL form to add the news to the DB, which I think I can do, so that the band members can add news them selves without modifying the page, and possibly / most likely messing something up in the process. What I have now is a page using IFRAME, and it loads my news page. The problem I have is A: making the database and B: calling to the database (I can't truely test it but there were a few things I didn't understand) I want to make a MySQL db for news to start with. I want it to show 4 things. A picture themed to the page with the day on it, under that a time stamp with time and date in short format, a title for the news article, and the body of the news. I then need to know the code to call to it from the php page for news, and make the form page for submitting. I talked to my old boss and he didn't have time to help me, just told me to blow money on a PHP book. Any help would be great and put to good use for a local band. F.Y.I. The errors I was having creating the table in phpMyAdmin was #1064, check for right syntax to use near '(100)DEFAULT 'pic' NOT NULL, 'date' TIMESTAMP(20) DEFAULT 'date' I tried a bunch of tutorials on using phpMyAdmin and this one was the one I got the least errors on. ----------------------------------- Blade Fri Jan 21, 2005 10:00 pm ----------------------------------- okay, i am not sure how much you know about this kind of stuff so to cover all bases iam gonna write it noob like. a mysql server has databases, in the databases are tables. tables have set "fields" which you can think of as colomns.. each row will have different information.. ie: table news: id | topic | message ------------------------ 1 | test | testing the news 2 | test2 | second news test just to make it easier the best way to do mysql stuff is to get a program called phpmyadmin, then edit the config file with your hostaddress (for your database), your username and password. phpmyadmin allows you fully control your database so it'd be best to put some type of security on it if you decide to use it. also the reasoning for using this is to make databases (as long as you have the proper permission on your mysql server), make tables etc.. what it sounds like is the only thing you want php to do is to read from the tables and insert new rows into the tables.. now. when you go into phpmyadmin you can create a new database if you need to, but some places give you your database so you are restricted to editing that one.. in this iam going to refer to your news table, as news. so you're going to want to create a table called news. you are going to need 5 fields in it from what you said you wanted it to display. the first one i always use in all my tables, it being the identifier, because you can have 2 of the same titles in your database or something similar. so we'll call that field id .. gonna be set as int and i usually set the size to 11 ... i also set id as the primary field and sometimes i set it to autoincrement... you may want to do this.. as for the other fields you will fill in the names according to what you want to be in them.. you said you wanted an image with the day on it.. so you may want to label that as iday .. and have a hyperlink created by php to determine which image to link it to.. you'll want that ot be varchar and maybe a length of 50.. 50 being the amount of characters (maximum being 255) the field is able to hold.. if it is more then mysql will return an error.. do the same with the rest of the fields... iam going to refer to your fields as: id, idate, date, title, body... now for the body you're going to want to set the type of that to text ... where there is no limit for the amount of characters it can hold .. (some other programs like phpmyadmin call it blob) .. so for that you will set no size... now for the php part.. first off to connect note: if you are unfamilar with any of these function, you can search for them at