Question

I have a table that I want to pick one row from it and show it to the user. every week I want to make the website automatically picks another row randomly. so, basically I want to get new result every week not every time a user visit the page.
I am using this code right now :

$res = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM fruit");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($res);
$offset = rand(0, $row[0]-1);
/* the first three lines to pick a row randomly from the table */
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM fruit LIMIT $offset, 1");
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res);

This code gets a new result everytime the user visit the page, and after every refresh another random row gets chosen. I want to make it update every week and the results are the same for every user. Is their a php command that does that? If so, how does it work?

Answer 1

My suggestion would be as follows:

• Store the random result id and timestamp is some other kind of persistent storage (file, DB table, etc).
• Setup a cron job or other automated task to update the record above weekly. If you don’t have access to such solutions, you could write code to do it on each page load and check against the timestamp column. However, that’s pretty inefficient.