Advice on making a message forum

[graham23s]

Hi Guys,

 

i was going to make a very basic forum users post, view posts etc nothing no where near as technical as this forum , or anything like that

 

my question is, whats the best way to assosciate the logged in user with his post? would i be better grabbing his $id = $_GET['id']; <-- then storing the id in the forum table (to link that user with his posts)

 

CREATE TABLE `forum_posts` (
  `id` int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `topic` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `detail` longtext NOT NULL,
  `username` varchar(65) NOT NULL default '',
  `email` varchar(65) NOT NULL default '',
  `datetime` varchar(25) NOT NULL default '',
  `view` int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
  `reply` int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE `forum_replies` (
  `post_id` int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
  `reply_id` int(4) NOT NULL default '0',
  `reply_username` varchar(65) NOT NULL default '',
  `reply_email` varchar(65) NOT NULL default '',
  `reply_answer` longtext NOT NULL,
  `reply_datetime` varchar(25) NOT NULL default '',
  KEY `reply_id` (`reply_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

 

thanks for any advice

 

Graham

[trq]

would i be better grabbing his $id = $_GET['id']; <-- then storing the id in the forum table (to link that user with his posts)

 

Yes. but as forum posters should be logged in (I assume you'll have a login system?), you can grab it from the $_SESSION array.

 

Also, no need to store the username, email type stuff in with each post, that is what the users table is for.

[taith]

in the table, store the id of whoever made it, then on login, set $_SESSION[userid]=$row[id]; thats prolly the easiest way to verify, while not compromizing security that much...

[graham23s]

Nice one guys thanks for the advice.

 

Graham