Question

How would I go about programming a daily message on my site that changes daily? I’m thinking of preloading all the messages in a MySQL database.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

I’ve tried

$msg_sql = "SELECT * FROM ".TABLE_PREFIX."quotes ORDER BY rand(curdate()) LIMIT 3";
$msg_res = mysqli_fetch_assoc(mysqli_query($link, $msg_sql));

But this only grabs the first MySQL result?

Answer 1

If you want a real message changing daily, you actually don’t need to rely on a database or anything fancy. A simple idea might be to create a directory (say /var/www/motds) and populate it with files named YYYY-MM-DD.txt (where YYYY is a 4 digit year number, MM is a two digit month number and DD is a 2 digit day number).

Then, the only thing you need to do in order to display your motd is:

$filename = '/var/www/motds/'.date("Y-m-d").'.txt';
if (file_exists($filename)) {
    echo file_get_contents($filename);
}

If you want your daily messages to be taken from a pool of entries (that you can pre-load), you might do something as follows:

$files = scandir('/var/www/motds'); // put files into an array
$messagecount = count($files) - 2;  // .. and . shall not be considered
$day = date("z");  // what day do we have today? 
echo file_get_contents('/var/www/motds/' . $files[($day % $messagecount) + 2]);