Re: Most viewed?

On Apr 15, 2008, at 5:26 PM, tedd wrote:

At 10:41 AM -0500 4/15/08, Steve Marquez wrote:

Greetings, Can any of you point me in the right direction on how to use PHP to create a most viewed or most clicked articles list? Can it be done with PHP? Thank you so much, Steve Marquez smarquez@ccfortsmith.com

Steve: There are a couple of ways to do this: 1) use mysql to record each download; 2) use a file to record each download. All you do is pass the user's click to a php script that records the transaction -- incrementing a counter in either mysql or a file and delivers the content to the user. You can include that number in your html to show how many transactions, if you want. This is an example of using a file: http://www.webbytedd.com/b/readwrite-download/ Cheers, tedd

If you want to take it a step further and only record a *click* if a person hasn't clicked this article before, you have several options. You can save a cookie on their computer saying they've clicked that article - of course they can delete the cookie, which may skew the count. Or you can save their IP address in a database (or file, if you want to choose that method) - only increment if that IP address hasn't clicked that article before. And of course, it's also very possible that their IP address can change. However, it should work pretty well. To get you started (and for the archives).... <?php $article_id = mysql_real_escape_string ($_GET['article_id']); // Cookie way if (!$_COOKIE["article-$article_id"]) {

    setcookie  ("article-$article_id", true, time()+60*60*24*365); // expire 1 year from now
    mysql_query ("UPDATE clicked_articles SET article_count = article_count+1 WHERE (article_id = '$article_id')");
    $result = mysql_query ("SELECT article_count FROM clicked_articles");
    $clicked_count = mysql_result ($result, 0);

} // IP-Database way $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; $result = mysql_query ("SELECT ip_address FROM clicked_articles WHERE (ip_address = '$ip') LIMIT 1"); if (!mysql_num_rows ($result)) {

    mysql_query ("INSERT INTO clicked_articles (article_id, ip_address) VALUES ('$article_id', '$ip')");
    $result = mysql_query ("SELECT COUNT(ip_address) FROM clicked_articles WHERE (article_id = '$article_id')");
    $clicked_count = mysql_result ($result, 0);

} ?> If you want to find the top 5 clicked articles, do the following respectively compared to above: <?php // If using Cookies $result = mysql_query ("SELECT article_id FROM clicked_articles ORDER BY article_count DESC LIMIT 0,5"); while (list ($id) = mysql_fetch_row ($result)) {

    $article_ids[] = $id;

} // If using IPs $result = mysql_query ("SELECT COUNT(article_id) AS article_id_count, article_id FROM clicked_articles GROUP BY article_id ORDER BY article_id_count DESC LIMIT 0,5"); while (list ($count, $id) = mysql_fetch_row ($result)) {

    $article_ids[] = $id;
    // OR to give count for each id
    $article_ids[$id] = $count;

} ?> Hope this helps. Note, the usual email-code disclaimer..... ~Philip PS... Sorry I'm two days late. Just now catching up. =D