I have a section on my website where users can post comments. Just above these comments I have 4 links - Oldest, Newest, Top Rated and Worst Rated. Currently I have 4 different pages for each of these links.
oldest.php - sorts the comments by date and time ascending
newest.php - sorts the comments by date and time descending
top.php - sorts the comments depending on how many likes they have
worst.php - sorts the comments depending on how many dislikes they have
They are all being sorted with a mySQL statement such as
$sql = "SELECT * FROM comments ORDER BY date DESC, time DESC LIMIT $offset, $rowsperpage";
I'm just wondering is there any way to order these comments by using just one page instead of having 4 different pages?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Yes, you pass the sort column and direction in the URL.
$type = 'new'; // default order
$cols = array('old', 'new', 'worst'); // array with possible options columns, to prevent SQL injection
if (in_array($_GET['type'], $cols) {
$type = $_GET['type'];
}
$order = (strtolower($_GET['order']) == 'asc')?'ASC':'DESC'; // again - to prevent bad data
$sql = "SELECT * FROM comments ORDER BY {$type} {$order}, time DESC LIMIT $offset, $rowsperpage";
If you have different queries, just use a switch() statement, and change the query accordingly for each type of order.
// use the same order as before
switch ($_GET['type']):
case 'old':
$sql = " ... ";
break;
// more options
default:
// default can be used for the most common option, for example when you first enter the page with no type argument in the URL
break;
One more thing - to generate the URLs you can use this:
$cols = array('old', 'new', 'worst'); // you can make this array a config variable
$order = array('asc', 'desc');
foreach ($cols as $col) {
foreach ($order as $ord) {
echo "<a href='index.php?type={$col}&order={$ord}'>".ucwords($col). ' ' . ucwords($ord)"</a>";
}
}
This will print all the types with all the possible orders. You should play around with this, you can do some neat, dynamic stuff.
Sure you can have single page to manage that.
Instead of 4 pages, you can have single page
comments.php
and then you can pass GET parameter like below for 4 links
comments.php?type=oldest
comments.php?type=newest
comments.php?type=top
comments.php?type=worst
Then on comments.php you can put conditional statement like below:
$order_by = "ORDER BY date DESC, time DESC"; // Default order
if(isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"] == "newest")
$order_by = "ORDER BY date DESC, time DESC";
elseif(isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"] == "oldest")
$order_by = "ORDER BY date, time";
elseif(isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"] == "top")
... put your order by here ...
elseif(isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"] == "worst")
... put your order by here ...
Then use below $sql
$sql = "SELECT * FROM comments ".$order_by." LIMIT $offset, $rowsperpage";