What is an effecient way to code separate comment areas?

Question

I realize this is somewhat of an abstract question that has several answers, but I am at a loss as to where to begin. I want to have a separate comments area for each of my blog posts. Should I just set up a different table for the comments for each entry manually every time I update the code to include the latest entry?

Answer 1

Create a new table for the comments with a structure similar to (of course you can customize it to your needs):

Comments
    id INT NOT NULL auto_increment,
    blog_id INT NOT NULL,
    author_id INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
    comment text NOT NULL,
    added_date DATETIME NOT NULL

The author_id is linked to the users table for logged in users, 0 for an anonymous user. Everything else should be self explanatory I hope.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you're quite getting at... but it sounds like you want to have comments specific to each post. If that's the case, just simply make a field in the comments table for "post_id" or something similar. Then on each post page just use a SELECT statement to grab comments for that particular post_id.

Answer 3

Simply have a database table storing the post ID in one of the fields. Something similar to the following:

CREATE TABLE blog_comments (
  id INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  author_id INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  post_id INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  comment TEXT NOT NULL,
  added_on TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);

Then you can simply query for post comments like thus:

$pid = 13; // or whatever your post ID is; could be a $_GET value
$sql = "SELECT * FROM comments WHERE post_id = '$pid' ORDER BY added_on DESC";

Of course, be sure to sanitize the above query, as you don't want any one passing what they feel like for the value of $pid. You need to make sure it's a number, and a number only.