How to develop "favorite" feature (put liked post into favorites list etc.)

[ilya Kraft]

Hello,

I need to develop "favorite" feature for my website. I'd like to use something similar to twitter. For example I have a page with lot's of different posts and then a link to "Favorite" post > If person clicks that link, post gets added to favorite list. How to develop something like this?

Additional - how can I change color of Favorited post say from white to yellow, so it indicates favorite posts for user.

[Markus]

Set up a table named something along the lines of 'user_favorites '. This table will contain two items:

1. user_id: so we can grab the favorited data for some user;
2. article_id: so we can later pull the relevant articles from your database.

Then you would build a simple database query that looks up data from your user_favorites table based on the user_id of the current user. From this data, you use the article_id data to query your articles table.

Now have a go and post back if you need help.

[ilya Kraft]

Hi,

Thnx, Alright I tried it here is what I've got so far.

//I've gathered users I'd before and it is in $id variable
//Now I select information from user_favorites

sql = ("SELECT * FROM user_favorites WHERE user_id=$id");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)){ 
$article_id=$row_["article_id"];
}

//Then I select articles that have id that is equal
//to $article_id

sql2 = ("SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id=$article_id");

//And then I just use while loop to gather info

Is this right approach to this? I haven't tried it yet, because I need to complete different areas before I can do this one ))) I asked question to be prepared )))

[Markus]

The second SQL query would have to be part of your first while loop, otherwise, you'll only have to last article id.

loop over each article id where user_id = $id
   select article from articles table where article id matches
end loop

That is the pseudo-code.

[ilya Kraft]

Wooh, Ok so it will have to look like this?

sql = ("SELECT * FROM user_favorites WHERE user_id=$id");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)){ 
$article_id=$row_["article_id"];
sql2 = ("SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id=$article_id");

//And I will initialize variables like $article_body, $title right after second query, is it right?

}

[Markus]

You would use the data from the second query within that loop, yes.