Alright, I've got a reviews page, and here is what I'm looking to do:

- the table will have a header (the console), and each and every game that belongs to that console will be there (the one I currently have creates a new header for each one, so it has 2 different Xbox headers)
- the games will be ordered by name alphabetically (ascending)

Can someone help me get started with this?

(and also, if it isn't too much trouble, how do you deal with multiple pages? Like, say, on my comments page I made for my blog, I have a "how many comments?" option (which does nothing at the moment), and I want to it display that many comments per page... how do I make seperate pages?)

Have you used any sort of loops with PHP yet?

I did use one with the alternating table colors... so, yes, I have.

The principle is all right there then. Basically, from what I understand, your headers would be static so you can create the table and TD's etc, in html, then where you want the repeat data from the database to be, just loop over an array from the db.

Here is an example taken straight from the php.net manual page for the mysql functions...

PHP Code:

<?php
// Connecting, selecting database
$link = mysql_connect('mysql_host', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')
   or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
echo 'Connected successfully';
mysql_select_db('my_database') or die('Could not select database');

// Performing SQL query
$query = 'SELECT * FROM my_table';
$result = mysql_query($query) or die('Query failed: ' . mysql_error());

// Printing results in HTML
echo "<table>\n";
while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
   echo "\t<tr>\n";
   foreach ($line as $col_value) {
       echo "\t\t<td>$col_value</td>\n";
   }
   echo "\t</tr>\n";
}
echo "</table>\n";

// Free resultset
mysql_free_result($result);

// Closing connection
mysql_close($link);
?>

That is fairly close to what you want to do.

Alright, yeah, I'm getting the basic concept of it, but...

When I try that, it gives me some strange results. And aside from that, I want to have the console name at the top... well, here's a basic model of what I want...

XBOX
------
game 1
game 2
game 3

GAMECUBE
----
game 1
game 2
game 3

That code above displays it like this:

XBOX
Game Name
1 (the id)

And repeats for each. It may be that I'm doing something wrong, but... I think I'm missing something here.

Ok, here is an example that I worked up.

PHP Code:

<table width="500" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr align="center">
    <td colspan="2">Xbox</td>
  </tr>
  <tr align="center">
      <?php
          // assume connection is present above
        
        // lets get the data from the db
        $sql = "SELECT gameid,gamename FROM tblXbox ORDER BY gamename ASC";
        $query = mysql_query($sql);
        
        // Now lets loop over the provided array
        // and echo the results
        while($res = mysql_fetch_assoc($query) {
            echo "<td>$res[gamename]</td>";
            echo "<td>$res[gameid]</td>";
        }
    ?>
  </tr>
</table>

<table width="500" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr align="center">
    <td colspan="2">Gamecube</td>
  </tr>
  <tr align="center">
      <?php
          // assume connection is present above
        
        // lets get the data from the db
        $sql = "SELECT gameid,gamename FROM tblGamecube ORDER BY gamename ASC";
        $query = mysql_query($sql);
        
        // Now lets loop over the provided array
        // and echo the results
        while($res = mysql_fetch_assoc($query) {
            echo "<td>$res[gamename]</td>";
            echo "<td>$res[gameid]</td>";
        }
    ?>
  </tr>
</table>

As you can see, all your really doing is echoing out new td's each loop so that it will dynamically add as many as there are games, putting them in any order is as simple as moving the order within the echo function. If you wanted to add more columns though you would have to change the column span of the first set of td's to match.

Also, I'm not sure how familiar you are with SQL but as you can see from the end of that query MySQL will automatically return the results in alphabetical order, according to the gamename column, ascending.

Let me know if you need more help.

Alright, I suppose with that approach it'd have been a lot easier, but I had just one MySQL table for all reviews, and just a field that said which console it belonged to... I may just have to do it the way you have demonstrated, though.

As for the alphabetical order.. yeah, I'm thinking I could've figured that out if I hadn't been ordering them by which console they were in.. I guess I was just going about it the wrong way.

I'll try it out tonight.

Thanks for the help.