NineChime forum

Before OekaiPoteto, I was strictly a Perl coder.  OP really gave me a head-start with PHP, and taught me very early what to do and NOT to do.

The PHP website is a terrific reference.  Syntax explanations are lacking and the warning about registered globals is very deeply burried, but all in all, reading the website alone will give you most of what you need to get started.

I'd recommend Drupal as a guideline for coding style and overall design.  The code quality is exceptional, and my new Oekaki board will likely be based on that project.

It's just a formality, as PHP closes the connection automatically when the script finishes.  It can, however, assist in debugging and tracking down odd database behavior.  It's also formal to provide the database handle ($dbconn).  Many scripts just call mysql_close() with no handle and that can cause some weird things to happen, too.

SQL is pretty easy to learn.  When you do a SELECT *, it means to select everything.  WHERE something='value' narrows down the search so the database doesn't blow up.  mysql_fetch_array() is used to get a lot of information from the database, but you may want to check out how that function works on http://www.php.net if you're serious about getting more detailed information.

Oh yeah, and PHP parses strings with double quotes, and uses literals with single quotes.  In other words, assuming the $name variable is 'Henry', echo 'MyName = $name' will print MyName = $name, whereas echo "MyName = $name" will print MyName = Henry.  I try to write my SQL statements with double quotes and use single quotes to delimit values in the SQL itself, such as $result = " SELECT * FROM {$OekakiPoteto_MemberPrefix}oekaki WHERE usrname='$name' ";  There's a lot of code still in Wacintaki that uses single quotes tacked together with periods and backslashes, and that's much less readable.

If there's other code you want to modify, just gimme a holler. 

First, you need to include the "dbconn.php" file, as it connects to the database and sets the database prefix.  Then, you need this somewhere:

$whoonline  = mysql_query ("SELECT COUNT(onlineusr) FROM {$OekakiPoteto_MemberPrefix}oekakionline");
$onlinerows = mysql_result($whoonline, 0);

The first line tells SQL to count the number of rows that exist for the field "onlineusr", and put a database handle into the $whoonline variable.  The second line uses the handle to actually get the result (row 0, or the first row of the result), and puts it into $onlinerows.  $onlinerows is the actual count you can use in your web page.

Tip:  it's proper to close the database connection after you're done with it, so add the line "mysql_close($dbconn);" somewhere at the end of your web page.