Marked

I didn't say it was orchestrated by the US government either, I was mostly agreeing with you apart from the US didn't play a bigger role in 911. I'll just warn you now, be careful what you say because most members are from the US and we don't want to start any flaming... even if it's the truth or not, you understand right? I'm not trying to censor you or anything. As a person who lives outside the US, even I can understand why someone would find it offensive. It would slightly piss me off to have my own government accused of killing its own people when I believed absolutely that it did not.

Understandable, though in fairness to others I'll leave it open unless other members also complain. Feel free to PM if anyone feels the same way as clone.

I recommend the documentary Zeitgeist. It discusses 911 and pretty much the whole picture, controlling the people so they government can do what it wants. I'm not sure pearl harbor was the same as 911 in the sense that both were controlled outside the US but the US let it happen so the people would want war. I dunno, hijacking planes seems like a more complicated task in which a lot could go wrong and therefore require the US to have organized the whole thing. Wouldn't it be pretty difficult to get explosives in the towers if it wasn't your own guys? Furthermore, why do you need a plane when you have explosives that are going to collapse it anyway. EDIT: Jesse66126, this definitely should not be a public poll. To make it private I would have to delete the votes, so I'll wait for your permission before I do.

Here's an interesting paragraph: Note that it doesn't state who is responsible for 911. But this does demonstrate an incentive. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_mongering

Is this not a big deal or something? I've never seen one in real life. Hope no one got hurt...

I believe the US government organized the destruction of the twin towers so that the US people would want the war in Iraq. It's pretty obvious that flying a plane into a building like that wouldn't collapse it, they needed to plant explosives so the floors would all collapse on top of each other. The US government is the most popular going around.

It's looking great so far :) I think we should display this if the site ever closes. To the next member to add their username: feel free to extend it to make more room, but keep the original scale.

He probably never registered an account. Most our content is available to guests anyway. We have twitter and youtube, but I did stop using twitter. I should have posted something though. The youtube channel is your best bet. I was going to add a message to the end of a video I released on the same day the site went down.

Thanks so much Pol ^_^

This is a bit of a cultural question, isn't it? I disagree with this quote because I think dating should be about having fun rather than seeking a life partner. I have a lot of opinions regarding the first post, particularly about girls dating douche bags and not liking nice guys, but no one reads long posts anyway say I'll stop here :)

Ah I heard this type of thing on the news recently actually. They're getting your emails and then sending spam to your contacts, so the spam doesnt look like spam at all, looks like its from your acquaintance. They still need a password. Sadly I fell for something like this once, which is completely shameful considering I'm supposed to be internet savy or whatever... But it was from this japanese girl from my contacts (on msn) who I did know personally, but she was strange so I thought she actually would upload photos to some strange site.... needless to say they got my password and started spamming my contacts... >.

I can see what you mean. Personally I would see it as Leon said. I have altered them, take a look. I think the reason for this though is that not every project is far enough into development to have screenshots, so we cant really say their absolutely required. That would reduce the amount of project topics (from few to...really few) because its like saying if your game isn't pretty far into development, then just dont post a topic. Members who actually plan their games will lose out, when they may have the best project topics, just minus the screenies.

Welcome back Kage Kazumi :) You didn't miss too much. A bit of drama I suppose, nothing too serious.

Oh, its not based on any forum software. I made the tables myself, but I think the fields are the same as IPB as I was looking at them when I made the sample data for this tutorial. Its supposed to teach how to do it with any forum software. They will all have these fields, just named differently.

Creating a Recent Posts module This tutorial shows you the various steps of how to create a little box that displays the latest posts of a forum using MySQL and PHP. Step 1. Install Sample Data For this tutorial I will provide you with a .SQL file containing the data we're going to use. If you're attempting this tutorial you should have something like XAMPP installed. I won't go into too much detail on how to install the sample data as this should be known, but I'll briefly go through the steps in XAMPP. 1. Open PHPMyAdmin in your browser (localhost/phpmyadmin/). 2. Create a new database (any name will do) - you should see the form right there on the page 3. Once created it should be selected on the left-hand panel, if not, select it 4. Next select "Import" and import the below .SQL document. sample data.zip Or you can run the following in a query: It should end up looking similar to this: Step 2. Connecting to the Database Now that we have all our data in the database, we need to connect to it so we can make queries. Most PHP tutorials that you find involving a connection to the database use the PHP mysql_ functions (Example: http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_connect.asp), but these have been obsolete for 6 years. We are going to use a library called PDO. It's not that hard to use, really. Recommended reading on PDO: http://www.webdevrefinery.com/forums/topic/1272-your-mysql-code-sucks/ I recommend reading that tutorial, it doesn't take too long. At the least it can been used as a reference. Alright, now lets get into some code :) First up, we're going to connect to our database. A lot of tutorials have a separate PHP file to connect to their database, but I find this annoying and makes more complicated especially for the less experienced coders. So I'm going to keep it all in one PHP file. So, create your PHP file in htdocs(In XAMPP) or wherever and open it up in your choice of editor, and run it in your browser too. Alright, here's how we are going to connect to our database: 1. $host = 'localhost'; 2. $port = 3306; // This is the default port for MySQL 3. $database = 'tutorial'; 4. $username = 'root'; 5. $password = ''; 6. 7. $dsn = "mysql:host=$host;port=$port;dbname=$database"; 8. 9. // Connect 10. $db = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;port=$port;dbname=$database", $username, $password); Lines 1 to 5 are the basic details we need to connect to the database. $database is the name of the database you created in step 1, don't forget to change that. By default in XAMPP, the username is 'root' and there is no password so we set it to blank. Line 7 basically creates a string from all of our variables. In reality we can use just one line to connect to the database, for example: $db = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;port=3306;dbname=tutorial', 'root', ''); Then we connect to the database on Line 10 using all of the information . Pretty simple, right? Now we are ready to execute some queries :). Step 3. Selecting the Latest Posts from the database If you have no idea how to write a simple MySQL query then unfortunately you are going to struggle to understand this next part and you may be better off just copying the code from it and moving on to the next step. However I will try explain it the best I can. Of all the tutorials I read about left joins in MySQL queries, I never really understood what was going on, I eventually figured it out myself. Read through it anyway and we'll see how it goes. In the sample data we have 3 tables: Posts, Members and Topics. If you look at a recent posts module it displays a topic names ordered by the date of the last post in them, and then the members username that made that topic. Therefore, each of these tables have a relationship to each other. Relationships are established through ID's (which is usually the first column of every table). For example, the table 'Posts' has a field called 'author_id'. In the following screenshot from the sample data, I have highlighted all posts by the member who has an ID of 1. So these particular rows have a relationship with the 'Members' table. Lets have a look at the 'Members' table to make these more clear... As you can see, the member with an ID of 1 has the username 'Marked'. So what is the point in this relationship? Well, using 'author_id' from Posts, we can select the username from the Members table. And that's basically what I'm trying to explain, we're finding a link between tables and getting various information from both. Here's one last effort to try and make the idea clearer in your mind. Alright, see where the Members and Topics table connect to the Posts table? You can see the fields that link them together, allowing us to get the title from Topics and name from Members. Now, how do we establish this relationship in MySQL? You need to be somewhat familiar with the syntax, good thing is that it's really simple to learn. I'll start really basic... Say you wanted to the latest 5 posts, and only wanted the post and its date. The syntax would be (how to implement this in PHP will be explained after, this is just showing MySQL syntax): SELECT post,post_date FROM posts ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 5 And this gives us: SELECT is the syntax used to get information to be used. Pretty simple, it selects fields. Next comes the fields you want to select. Its common to use the wildcard * to select everything. After this is 'FROM [table]' which determines which table we are selecting from. We could stop there and that would work, but we want to order it by most recent. The syntax is 'ORDER BY' followed by the name of the field you want to order it by. In the case we used post_date, but we could also use id. DESC orders by the largest number first, ASC by the lowest number first (if you don't specify, its ASC by default). Next is the limit, this basically sets a cut off point. LIMIT 5 will make it stop at the first 5. If you don't specify, all rows will be selected. You can also do things like LIMIT 5,10 which selects the rows from 5 to 10. Ok that's a crash course in MySQL syntax. Now lets construct the query we are going to use. But first we need to know about left joins real quick. Recommended reading: http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join_left.asp . In short, a simple left join looks like this: SELECT posts.post,members.name FROM posts LEFT JOIN members ON members.id=posts.author_id So as you can see, this is how we establish the relationship between two tables and connect their fields together. In this bit: 'members.id=posts.author_id', both fields relate to the same set of ID's, that is, the ID's of the members. This example query returns the following: Everything in this step so far has been to try and explain the query we're going to write to get all the information so we can start constructing the module on the page. Ok, here it is. This will connect all 3 tables together. SELECT topics.title,topics.tid,members.name,posts.post_date FROM topics LEFT JOIN posts ON posts.topic_id=topics.tid LEFT JOIN members ON members.id=posts.author_id ORDER BY posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 10 And this gives us: Step 4. Display the information on the page Alright, lets get into some PHP. Now we need to run the query using our PDO object we setup in Step 2. By now you should have the following in your PHP file from step 2: Here is how to execute our query: //Prepare query $statement = $db->prepare("SELECT topics.title,topics.tid,members.name,posts.post_date FROM topics LEFT JOIN posts ON posts.topic_id=topics.tid LEFT JOIN members ON members.id=posts.author_id ORDER BY posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 10"); //Execute query $statement->execute(); //Start the while loop while ($result = $statement->fetchObject()) { echo $result->title; echo "<br />"; } A lot of this is PDO syntax such as $statement = $db->prepare and $statement->execute(). After we do these we have all our information stored in the $statement variable ready to use. Next we have our while loop. This allows us to execute some code for each individual row that we selected in our query. We can access each field we selected by using the '$result' variable followed by an '->' followed by the field name. For example, to get the topic ID, I use '$result->tid'. Your PHP file should now look like this: Give that a test. It should look like this in your browser: Step 5. Inside the While Loop Now lets work within the while loop and setup all the information we selected. I hope you're familiar with HTML. Lets wrap every row within a div, and also wrap the entire while loop in a div: //Start the while loop ?><div style="width:100px"><? while ($result = $statement->fetchObject()) { ?><div></div><? } ?></div><? I have mixed html with PHP by ending the php tags and starting them again. There are various ways to mix the two, but I just use this method. I styled the outer div to make it look not so ugly, which really should be done in CSS. Add the Topic Title We want this to be linked to the actual topic, so that is why we have selected the ID. Here's how its done: //Start the while loop ?><div style="width:200px;border:1px solid #000;padding:2px"><? while ($result = $statement->fetchObject()) { ?><div><a href="http://www.rmxpunlimited.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=<?=$result->tid?>"><?=$result->title?></a></div><? } ?></div><? This gives us: So what we have done is linked all of our topic titles to their topics. I have used: <?=$result->title?> But its more common to use: <? echo $result->title?> Either is fine. Add the Author's Name This is basically the same thing. I forget to add the members ID to the query, so we won't be linking to the members Profile... Here's the code we will add: <p>By <?=$result->name?></p> So our while loop now looks like this: //Start the while loop ?><div style="width:200px;border:1px solid #000;padding:2px"><? while ($result = $statement->fetchObject()) { ?><div><a href="http://www.rmxpunlimited.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=<?=$result->tid?>"><?=$result->title?></a></div> <p>By <?=$result->name?></p><? } ?></div><? Which comes out like this: Yes, its ugly. But, it has all the info of a pretty module :) Its whats on the inside that counts... er.. yeah. Add the date Ok, here's some real PHP stuff. The date are stored in timestamps. Here's one from the sample data '1170888393'. This number is the number of seconds since January 1 1970 until the date of the post. Timestamps are pretty useful actually. There are many ways we can use it to display the time. For this tutorial we are going to use the PHP date function. Here's the syntax: string date ( string $format [, int $timestamp ] ) echo date("[a string]",timestamp); Now the string we need a reference for. There are various combinations we can use which are listed here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php For this tutorial we wanted the hours followed by the day of the month and month. So from that link we can get the following string: "hA - d M". So to use the date function in our tutorial, we can write this: date("hA - d M",$result->post_date) Lets add this to our while loop: ?><div style="width:200px;border:1px solid #000;padding:2px"><? while ($result = $statement->fetchObject()) { ?><div><a href="http://www.rmxpunlimited.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=<?=$result->tid?>"><?=$result->title?></a></div> <p>By <?=$result->name?> at <?=date("hA - d M",$result->post_date)?></p><? } ?></div><? And this will look like this: Here is our PHP file at this stage: The next step is to do the CSS and make it all look pretty... but that's for another tutorial. Hope you learned something new from this :)

Oh yes, you did Kiriashi. I forgot. Not sure who you're being an arse there. I think it would be appropriate for a member to be a staff member who worked on this, as long as there is some decent content posted each week.

I have started, but it will take some time to write up I think. I have constructed a sample database and just started writing the first steps of the tut. I'll try and finish it today, but no promises. EDIT: http://www.rmxpunlimited.net/forums/topic/5581-creating-a-recent-posts-modul/ Goodluck with it, not sure who you will go. You may want to save it for later or something...

Kiriashi was going to do this but he never really got into it. I'm waiting for him to reply here... We actually have it all set up. He has a secondary group which gives him access to a special forum, one you post there it shows up on the homepage like announcements, but its only visible on the homepage. You could anything interesting really. Latest project topics, interesting discussion topics, lastest RGSS Scripts/Gallery Uploads/Resource submissions/Tutorials, most popular downloads/gallery images of the week etc. Start contests perhaps, talk about the RM community in general or maybe talk about the latest entries of the tkool blog.

I made a little demo for you, take a look at the event. Project21.zip

Both of you should read my last post.... I'm pretty sure the post was simple too long. So instead just attach it to your post. Otherwise when it tries to insert all that info into the database, it's just too much and it fails.