Building an Authors Page for a PEAR CMS - Extracting Author Information

Next, the code runs a simple query that extracts all the author information from the authors database table:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM authors";

$res = $db->query($sql);

The results of this query are stored in the $res variable. The variable is then tested to see if any records have been found. If records are found, the code continues to run the while loop.

if($res){

while ($row = $res->fetchRow(DB_FETCHMODE_OBJECT)) {

?>

The while loop retrieves all the records while at the same time building dynamic rows that will accommodate the author names as they are retrieved. Also note that a link to the authart page is created with a query string that passes a author id to that page: 

<tr>

<td class="auth"><a href="authart.php?aid=<?php print $row->aid?>" class="auth"><?php print $row->name?></a></td>

</tr>

If the $res variable does not contain any records, the code shows an appropriate error message and closes the table:

<?php }

}else{

?>

<tr>

<td colspan="2" class="maintxt"><p class="auth">No authors found</p></td>

</tr>

<?php } ?>

</table>

Then the HTML page is closed:

<!-- InstanceEndEditable --></td>

</tr>

<tr class="copy">

<td colspan="2">&copy;2008</td>

</tr>

</table>

</body>

<!-- InstanceEnd --></html>

The next page that we are going to look at is the authart.php page. It is responsible for showing all the articles written by a particular author. The code that is at the heart of this script is something like this:

<?php

include 'db.php';

include 'connx.php';

if(isset($_GET['aid'])){

$aid=mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['aid']);

}

$sql = "SELECT * FROM stories WHERE author='".$aid."'";

$res = $db->query($sql);

if($res){

while ($row = $res->fetchRow(DB_FETCHMODE_OBJECT)) {

?>

<tr>

<td class="title"><a href="view.php?sid=<?php print $row->sid?>" class="title"><?php print $row->title ?></a></td>

</tr>

<?php }

}else{

?>

<tr>

<td colspan="2" class="auth"><p class="auth">No articles found</p></td>

</tr>

<?php } ?>

</table>

The code above simply retrieves the articles from the stories table that belong to the author with the given ID. These articles will then be listed in the HTML table that is constructed by the while loop. I will discuss this code in more detail in the next article.