In this tutorial we will build a simple php/mysql based guest book. Like my previous "Beginners Guide to PHP/MySQL" I will try to keep thinks as simple as possible. This tutorial mainly directed to people with small or none programming experience, nevertheless, I will assume that you have read my beginners guide to php/mysql.

Creating a new mysql database and table for the guest book:

Mysql should return something like:
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.06 sec)

Then, we have to choose the database we created by typing:

Database changed

Now we can create the table for the information. I chose to create a table with timestamp, first name, last name, visitors email and the visitors comment.

MySQL should return something like:
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)

Displaying the information:

As you can see, I used the mysql_connect function with no information inside the (). If you use a remote computer of a unix based php/mysql you have to use a slightly different syntax: mysql_connect ('servername','your_username','your_password');

Well, this page is rather complex at first glance, but I will try my best explain it.

At the top of the page you can see the following section:

Those two commands check whether I transferred data into the page or not, and if not it sets two default values that will be used later on. To check if I transferred any variables, I used the empty ($variable) command which returns false if $variable is set and has a non-empty or non-zero value; and returns true otherwise.

Once I set default values to my variables, I can query the MySQL database with:

Notice that I used the two variables in this command (which at start hold the default values set previously). The order by $srt sorts selection by $srt (which holds TimeStamp as default) and limit $offset,10 gets the first 10 results starting with $offset.

The next section prints the results in a formatted table as I explained this in my Beginners Guide to PHP/MySQL. The only interesting thing is the sort options I added with:

Here you can see how to transfer variables with links and not forms. I used the srt variable to transfer the sorting method to the page itself (or any other page for that matter).

Now I define two variables to be used later as new offsets for the next and previous entries on the table:

Next I need to know the total number of entries on the table in order to see if I have more results or not:

I select all the rows from the table, and use the mysql_num_rows($res) which returns the number of rows in a result set.

Now consider the following php script:

Here I have two "if" conditions which check whether I have more entries in the table, whether I have previous entries or none. The script creates two small forms that transfer to the php script both the offset for the table and the sorting method.

At the end of the page I just add the links.x which holds any necessary additional links and voila.

Adding entries to the table:

The script itself is rather simple to anyone familiar with forms. The only interesting thing is the TimeStamp I used in hidden mode:

I just used the php date function to create a time stamp and use it as the fields default value. This enables me to make sure that if I want to delete or modify an entry I have a unique value to match.

All those values are transferred to another php script called add2tbl.php3 which inserts the data into the table:

Well, that's it for now.
Rafi Ton