Grab your popcorn, coffee, blowup doll, whatever it is that passes time, and settle in for a lengthy post!
Being relatively new to the world of PHP development, as well as the associated technologies (MySQL, CSS, etc), I’m going to ask that you bear with me while I ramble on about things that, for many of you, may seem entirely trivial. My reasoning for doing this is because a) repeating what I’ve learned reinforces the lessons, and b) someone else may find it beneficial. The level of detail and technical jargon I use will vary. Sorry. So, without further ado, here goes…
The application is a platform for users to submit pick up lines (guys) and seduction tips (girls). Users are allowed to vote on content added by the opposite sex (IE, guys may vote for seduction tips, and girls for pick up lines) as well as being able to comment (on either type).
The above requirements are quite straightforward. The implementation thereof, is interesting. While the application is really simple, a lot of users never get to see what’s really going on behind the scenes. Here’s a quick rundown:
The first thing we do is grab the user’s sex from their profile. This allows us to automatically present the correct input forms when they wish to post a pick up line / seduction tip.
Submitting
When the user submits a pick up line / seduction tip, it needs to be cleaned of any potentially harmful code (like bad JavaScript). This is done by stripping out any illegal characters from their submission.
Once we have the submission, we give it a unique tracking id, so we can find it again later on. We also record the pertinent details such as who made the submission (in this case, the user’s unique Facebook ID), the date and time, and the type of submission (pul/tip). All of this is done behind the scenes, on the fly. This information is then added to our database as a new record.
Formatting
Having hundreds of lines of content stored in a database is all good and well, but we need a way to display it. For this I wrote a simple function (Yeah Tyler, simple 
) which could be called in a number of ways, depending on how we wished to display the content. For example, listing the 10 most recent entries, whether they be pick up lines or seduction tips. Or, more specifically, displaying all the entries of a single user. Or a random selection. Or the 5 most voted (more on voting in a bit!) for pick up lines, tips, or both.
Once the function is called (and provided with its criteria) it will send the data (encapsulated in named <div> tags) back to the calling file, which then applies any CSS styling we need (to make it pretty!) and pushes it to the browser. The data it sends back include:
- the author
- date and time
- number of votes for the item
- the actual text of the item
- number of comments.
Voting
Users are allowed to vote for content submitted by the opposite sex. They may only vote once per item, but can vote on as many items as they like. A few things need to happen here. When the pick up line / seduction tip is displayed, a voting badge is (think Digg) is attached to it. This badge is generated along with every pul/tip that gets sent back to the browser. Every time a line is displayed, we need to check if a) the current user is allowed to vote for this item (opposite sex?) and b) if they are allowed to vote, have they voted for this item before? If so, we disable voting for that item. If not, we provide a button with will then enable them to vote.
When a user votes for an item, we need to record some more details. We need to know
- who the vote is coming from (the user’s Facebook id)
- which item the vote is for (the unique tracking id I mentioned earlier)
- the date and time of the vote
1 & 2 are important in terms of avoiding duplicate votes in the system.
Ranking
Once we have a table full of votes, we can use the information to do some form of ranking on our items. A few possibilities include ranking based on:
- Overall number of votes per user
- Overall number of votes per item
- Most active users (who’s doing the voting)
Commenting
Quite similar to voting in terms of code and structure, but a bit more simple. Here there are less constraints. A user can comment on any item, and more than once. Here we record the following:
- who the comment is coming from (the user’s Facebook id)
- which item the comment is for (the unique tracking id I mentioned earlier)
- the date and time of the comment
- the actual comment itself (the text)
And that’s pretty much it! There are a bunch of other cool bits and pieces, but that would make this an (even more) exceptionally long post.
Tags: css, facebook, howto, MySQL, php, programming, tutorial
Nice one! If I could write like this I would be well chuffed. The more I see articles of such quality as this (which is rare), the more I think there might be a future for the Net. Keep it up, as it were.