I'm working on building a "social networking" site, basically theres a login and a forum where users can post, a gallery where you can upload pictures, send friend requests.
What I wanna do next is creating some kind of way a user can now someone has replied to a post they've made, if someone has sent them a friend request, tagged in a pic etc. Notifications.
This is kind of advanced to me so I felt I had to ask what would be the best way to do this, how do big sites do it?
Right now I'm thinking making a table "notifications"
id, user1, user2, type, link, have_read
And when for example I reply to a post by user Tom, I insert to that table
insert (Tom, Bob, 'post-reply', 'link to the post'
and if Tom sends Bob a friend request
insert (Tom, Bob, 'friend-request', 'link to where you can accept request'
You could add a Boolean "Notify" set to true once a request has been made.
If the Boolean is true you can add a notification bar which shows a message if the notify boolean is so to true