Question

Hey all, so I’m just trying to make a basic chatbox on my site that users will enter in a message and it will display in the box.

To get to the chatbox, users will already be logged into the site. So in the chatbox they wouldnt have to enter in their ‘Name’. Just a message.

What would be the best way of doing this?

Answer 1

You wouldn’t read the username from the database. If a user is already logged in, then you should have (or should use) a username in $_SESSION["user"] for example.

Your chatbox could use nothing more than a simple text <input> that you then receive server-side and store it into the database:

db("INSERT INTO chatbox (user, message, time) VALUES (?,?,?)")
-execute( array($_SESSION["user"], $_POST["input"], time()) );

Which then again is pretty easy to read out and display as a chatbox. (Maybe add a bit of AJAX polling once you have that working.)