news release/date HELP

[jbrill]

Hey Everyone, Im new to this board and to PHP.

Im looking for help with a certain peice of of code that is crucial to the current site im working on.

 

I have created a customized news release where the customer can log in,enter a title and content, which then posts it in a stylized manner on the main website.

 

However he recently requested that there be a "Release on: [date]" and "Expire on: [date]"

 

Basically, he wants to be able to preload the database with news releases that are set to realease on a certain date, and then expire on another date. how would i go about doing this?

 

I would really appreciate some help on this 

 

Thanks Alot!

[per1os]

Add the 2 fields to the database and code a sql statement that states if the release date is not greater than equal to current and the expire date has not passed yet, display this news release.

[jbrill]

Do you think you could write that in code so I can visually see what you mean? As I said, im pretty new to this PHP thing

I use the variable $today for today's date it displays from this code:

 

<?php

$today = date("F j, Y ");          // May 8, 2007

?>

[obsidian]

Do you think you could write that in code so I can visually see what you mean?

 

You will want to use the DATE or DATETIME field in the MySQL database to store your date. Basically, this means that you need to format your date into a YYYY-MM-DD format for insert. Once you have the dates in the database, you can simply query for all records BETWEEN those two dates:

SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE CURDATE() BETWEEN startDate AND endDate;

 

Hope this helps point you in the right direction.

[jbrill]

Awesome! thanks for the hlp guys. Let me give this a try....

[per1os]

<?php
$releaseDate = strtotime("05/01/2007"); // should be retireved from teh database in some format
$expireDate = strtotime("05/08/2007"); // should be retireved from teh database in some format

// strtotime is used to convert the above to unix timestamps for comparison.

$today = time(); // unix timestamp of today

if ($releaseDate >= $today && $expireDate < $today) {
     print "The article should be printed here";
}else {
     print "The article has expired.";
}

// The above is the PHP version, the mysql version would be something like this.
// assuming the date is stored as an INT(11) in the database with 
// column names expiredate and releasedate that hold unix timestamps:
$getArticles = "SELECT * FROM table_articles WHERE releasedate >= " . $today . " AND expiredate < " . $today . " ORDER BY releasedate;";
$res = mysql_query($getArticles) or die(mysql_error());
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
  print $row['articlename']; // print article data here
}
?>

 

The mysql portion I am not sure if it allows the >=, but yea. That is "an example" of what the code would look like.

[jbrill]

Do you think you could write that in code so I can visually see what you mean?

 

You will want to use the DATE or DATETIME field in the MySQL database to store your date. Basically, this means that you need to format your date into a YYYY-MM-DD format for insert. Once you have the dates in the database, you can simply query for all records BETWEEN those two dates:

SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE CURDATE() BETWEEN startDate AND endDate;

 

Hope this helps point you in the right direction.

 

I used this technique and it is working perfectly, expect for one thing... If I only enter a start date, and leave the expiry date blank ( so it will never expire) it will not display the nes because it defaults to 0000-00-00

 

how can i get around this?

[per1os]

make it default to 2037-12-31

 

I think that is the highest date you can use and hopefully it would have been deleted before than.

[obsidian]

I used this technique and it is working perfectly, expect for one thing... If I only enter a start date, and leave the expiry date blank ( so it will never expire) it will not display the nes because it defaults to 0000-00-00

 

how can i get around this?

 

I would use some sort of CASE statement in my query to test whether or not there is an endDate, and if not, just return tomorrow's date so it never expires:

SELECT *
FROM myTable
WHERE CURDATE() BETWEEN startDate AND (CASE
WHEN endDate = '000-00-00' THEN CURDATE + INTERVAL 1 DAY
ELSE endDate
END CASE)