Personal Message System

[Space Cowboy]

Does anyone know of a tutorial to code ur own PM system for ur website in php?

[Man1c M0g]

Errrr. It shouldn't be too difficult surely? If you have a membership system with IDs, all you need to do is have four fields in your MySQL table - the sender ID, the recipient ID, the message, and the date it was sent. You can get PHP to do the rest, including BBcode handling, length limiting, and all that...

[Space Cowboy]

Ah sounds easy enough! I was thinking about it only problem i though about was multiple messages, how do u stop one writting over the other! So if you get one message but dont look at it then you get anouther message how would u stop the second message over writting the first!

[Man1c M0g]

Well, add a primary index field with AUTO_INCREMENT enabled and call it something like 'messageid' - then you can have multiple messages from the same people and each message will be saved as a seperate entry - and because each message will have its own unique ID, deleting your messages and/or otherwise managing them will be easy.

[ParaSnake]

Lets me give u a good advice:When u think about making something,take a paper,a pencil,a chair and a table,then think about ur script,even if its a simple guestbook,u have to concerntrate on it,and write(or draw0 down everything u can imagine,and finally,draw down the databse that u have to make,draw all it down.
And after doing all of that,u are standing on a strong platform to complete your script

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks for the advise, for the auto increment do i put all these feilds in the user table i use for my site? I understand the code for the system its the Table Layouts im unshure of!

[Man1c M0g]

Yeah - autoincrement is a feature of the column that you can set (very easily if you use the phpMyAdmin applet). When its all set up correctly you never need to actually set a value for the auto-incrementing field - it will automatically fill itself in when you add a new row.

[Space Cowboy]

This is getting confusing i tried to add a primary index field with auto increment and got the following error "#1075 - Incorrect table definition; There can only be one auto column and it must be defined as a key" am i ment to be adding this into my main table?

[Man1c M0g]

Yeah. Add it and define it as the primary key with auto_increment. I won't describe WHY - that goes into database construction in some depth... and i'm too lazy...

[Space Cowboy]

um im getting confused in my users table i have id which is primary and auto increment and i can't have two. Should i create a new table called messages then, and add username, messageid and everything?

[ParaSnake]

This is what i can imagine about the PM system:
table name : message
col 1 : username - store the username who will receive the mesage on col "message"
col 2 : message - Store the message
col 3 : read - default value is 0,if the user click on the message ,turn this value to 1,means that it isn`t a unread message anymore.
col 4 : time - store the date and time of the message
col 5 : sender - store the sender`s name
col 6 : subject - store the subject of the message.

See? you dont need any ID in this script,all u need is make a simple query like ("SELECT * From message WHERE username="'.$name_of_the_receiver."' ")
You can also sort those messages by date,sender,ect...

P.S:If the username haev an ID,i suggest you use ID instead of uing username

[Man1c M0g]

Originally Posted by Space Cowboy

um im getting confused in my users table i have id which is primary and auto increment and i can't have two. Should i create a new table called messages then, and add username, messageid and everything?

Oh HELL yes! You should create seperate tables for each major new feature that requires lots of new data fields - it keeps your tables much simpler that way. You can always pass variables between the tables using PHP - its dead easy really! Just think of it this way - your MessageID field will be the unique auto-incrementing one unique to this table, your sendingusername/receivingusername will relate to the member ID on the Users table.

Its all very logical - you just have to get your head around thinking in this way.

[Space Cowboy]

Ahh thanks guys makes more sense now! Now i just have to set out a structure and work out how its going to work! Thanks again guys very help full!

[Order]

When developing, paper and a pencil, as archiac as it seems is the most useful tool a programmer can have.. I have literally notebooks full of programming notes on things I code or plan to code on.

[ViciOuS]

Originally Posted by Order

When developing, paper and a pencil, as archiac as it seems is the most useful tool a programmer can have.. I have literally notebooks full of programming notes on things I code or plan to code on.

This is very true, for beginners and advanced coders alike. Another thing that seems to help me out a lot, is make the interface first (after you have drawn everything out on paper first) with html/css or even a grahpical user interface (gui) made from photoshop or paint shop pro. This way, all you have left to do is slap in your code. I personally think it's better to make it in html/css before you move on to a gui, that way it's easier to change things and make arrangements.

I hope this helps!