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Cookie and PHP - an example

Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:05 pm
by PHPeanuts
Hello guys,

I'm starting with PHP, and I came across an issue far too complicated for me to solve.

I'm running a blog and I would like to give an alert if a recent user comes back, and there are new comments on the listed posts to read on, since his last visit.

What I would figure "mentally" is the following process :

- the user arrives, and receives a cookie recording the server's time.
- Next time he comes, that cookie is checked against the time the last comment has
- if user's time is less than comment's, print a "New Comment!" message per new comment
- if not, nothing happens

But, if I were to translate this in PHP I didn't know how to do it.

Imagine I can have an array of comment's times, via a tag called get_last_comment_time();

If anybody can give me a snippet, I could figure out the rest of the syntaxis...

This is my terrible, hypothetical attempt :

Code: Select all

 
<!-- I send the cookie -->
 
<?php
 
// How long should something be considered new for? (In seconds.)
// seconds * minutes * hours * days
// Default is 72 hours (3 days).
 
$stillnew = 60*60*24*3;
 
setcookie('CookiePublishing', time()-$stillnew, time()+60*60*24*30, '/');
 
?>
 
<!--I check the cookie and print -->
 
<?php
 
$entrydate = get_last_comment_time();
 
if ($_COOKIE['CookiePublishing'] < $entrydate) {
  echo '<p>New Comment!</p>';
}
 
?>
 
Is this syntaxis correct ?
Could I use this in a loop ?

Many thanks for any input.