Question

When a user on my site visits their profile page, they are met with a list of posts they have made. I currently show 20 posts by default, but have no way of showing older posts. I would like to add a show more posts button that will load additional/older posts onto the page. What should i do to display more posts to the user after they click the show more button?

Here is my show posts function

function show_posts1($userid){
$posts = array();
$sql = "SELECT p.body, p.stamp, p.id,u.username, u.imagelocation 
    FROM posts p 
    INNER JOIN users u 
    ON p.user_id=u.id 
    WHERE p.user_id='$userid' 
    ORDER BY p.stamp DESC";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while($data = mysql_fetch_object($result)){
    $posts[] = array(   'stamp' => $data->stamp, 
                        'userid' => $userid, 
                        'body' => $data->body,
                        'username' => $data->username,
                        'imagelocation'=>$data->imagelocation,
                        'id'=>$data->id
                );
}
return $posts;
}

Here is how i display the posts on the page

<?php
$posts = show_posts1($_SESSION['user_id']);
if (count($posts)){
?>
    <table>
<?php
        foreach ($posts as $key => $list){
            echo "<tr>";
            echo "<td>".$list['body']."
                 </td>";
            echo "</tr>";
        }
?>
    </table>
<?php
}else{
?>
    <p><b>You haven't posted anything yet!</b></p>
<?php
}
?>

Answer 1

Your query should look like this to paginate your results

$sql = "SELECT p.body, p.stamp, p.id,u.username, u.imagelocation 
    FROM posts p 
    INNER JOIN users u 
    ON p.user_id=u.id 
    WHERE p.user_id='$userid' 
    ORDER BY p.stamp DESC
    LIMIT <offset>,<max_rows>";

Store the current offset in Javascript and then just use AJAX to call show_posts1 ($userid[, $offset]) to run the query again and retrieve the next 20 posts.