OK I want to display 5 recent updates on several pages. I'm going to use MySQL to create a column for date, and column for update (text).

I want to echo the updates in a div, and in the format:

<p>01/01/01</p>
<p>Update text goes here. i have updated blah....</p>

How would I take the information from the DB and echo it like the above? And how can I limit the amount of updates to be echoed to five?

Thanks for any response

Something like this should get you started.

PHP Code:

<?php
//Assume $database is an instance of MySQLi
$recent_updates = '';
if ($my_query = $database->query("SELECT last_updated, page_text FROM my_table ORDER BY last_updated DESC LIMIT 5")) {
  if ($my_query->num_rows >0) {
    while ($a_result = $my_query->fetch_object()) {
    $recent_updates .= '
<p>'.date('m/d/y',strtotime($a_result->last_updated)).'</p>
<p>'.htmlentities($a_result->page_text).'</p>';
    }
  }
}
if (strlen($recent_updates) > 0) {
  echo '<div class="recent_updates">'.$recent_updates.'</div>';
}
?>

Thanks, whats MySQLi sorry?

It gives you access to MySQL's "improved" features that were added since 4.0. Examples are prepared statements, stored procedures, stored functions, multi_query. You can see more info at http://www.php.net/mysqli