Question

I am making a notification script and currently have this to display multiple notifications about the same image as one, e.g john likes image_name, sarah likes image_name -> 2 people like image_name.

this is what i have so far.

$query = mysql_query("SELECT type, extra_id, COUNT(*), id AS count FROM `notifications` WHERE `receiver_id` = '14' AND `read` = '0' GROUP BY type, extra_id");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){

    if($row['count'] == 1){

        switch ($row['type']) {
            case "Following":
                echo "John Doe is now following you <br />";
            break;
            case "Liked":
                $image_id = $row['extra_id'];
                $image_q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE `id` = '$image_id' LIMIT 1");
                $image = mysql_fetch_array($image_q);
                echo "John Doe likes ".$image['heading']."<br />";
            break;
        }

    }   else   {

        switch ($row['type']) {
            case "Following":
                echo $row['count']." New Users are following you <br />";
            break;
            case "Liked":
                $image_id = $row['extra_id'];
                $image_q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE `id` = '$image_id' LIMIT 1");
                $image = mysql_fetch_array($image_q);
                echo $row['count']." Users Like ".$image['heading']."<br />";
            break;
        }

    }

}

And my database looks like this for notifications table.
http://i.minus.com/iZtrR0MNZ95Qn.png

And the output from the code is,

2 New Users are following you 
5 Users Like IMAGE_ID_29
John Doe likes IMAGE_ID_50

where it should be

2 New Users are following you
John Doe likes IMAGE_ID_29
2 Users like IMAGE_ID_50

Answer 1

Your query currently is:

SELECT type, extra_id, COUNT(*), id AS count FROM `notifications` WHERE `receiver_id` = '14' AND `read` = '0' GROUP BY type, extra_id

that is, your are using the id field as your count.

You may probably want to rewrite it as:

SELECT type, extra_id, COUNT(*) AS count, id FROM `notifications` WHERE `receiver_id` = '14' AND `read` = '0' GROUP BY type, extra_id