Sorting data - Whats the best way?

[Accurax]

I have a number of members stored in my database, and i would like to create a page to allow people to browse through the members and see certian bits of information.

 

I would like this page to be dynamically ordered (sorted) by the date the information was last updated, thereby keeping the most up to date information at the front, and penalising those that dont update often.

 

I am thinking of simply adding a field in my database, and inserting a gregorian timestamp (based on the servers current date) everytime a member updates the info.

 

Firstly, is this the best way of keeping track of updates ?

 

And, how would i go about ordering my data by this particular data?..... does php have an "order by" function?

[benjaminbeazy]

mysql_query("SELECT * from members ORDER BY last_updated DESC");

 

that is if you make a field last_updated with a unix timestamp

[Accurax]

Thats exactly what i was looking for thankyou.

[benjaminbeazy]

no problemo

[php_joe]

If you're storing your info as lines in a text file instead of a mysql database, you could do what you said and add a field to the front of each line, getting the info for field with time().

 

Then, before you write to the file, use sort() or arsort() to sort the info.

 

Joe