I'm building a HN clone in PHP, and I need help

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652495

by wocp • 12 years ago

8 11 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, well as the title says, I'm programming a HN clone. I choose PHP because is more simple to find a hosting which provides us PHP.

And I have some questions, the first is about HN comments, in its structure a comment is an item. I'm using MySQL, and my table 'items' can store comments too. My question is: HN has a limit deep in comments? Because is complicate get comments using recursivity.

That's the reason because I prefer use SQL and a limit of comments.

I have no time to finish quickly this project, but I'll try to do it fast.

There are lots of broken links, only works the login/signup and an item views.

URL: http://news.sourcezilla.com

Thanks in advance.

company2• 12 years ago

You need to do self joins. You can have one comments table but there can be parent_id for each comment.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3362038/what-is-self-join... this might help.

wocp5• 12 years ago

Yes, my table structure has a parent_id field. The problem is that I need know the depth, or use recursivity to get all parents.

Using hierarchy and recursivity like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4216875/php-reorder-array...

company2• 12 years ago

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/01/27/php-class-for-thread...

see if that helps

dosh• 12 years ago

Just out of curiosity, is hacker news built in similar fashion to reddit? Considering reddit is a YC invested company. reddit is open source so...

wocp5• 12 years ago

Hi dosh, I don't think that HN is build or is inspired in Reddit code/design. Both of them are open source, but Reddit is build in Python and HN in Lisp.

ijovanovic• 12 years ago

I'm up for it. Shoot me an email.

wocp5• 12 years ago

What's your email? :-)

vithlani• 12 years ago

PHP...Yes, you need serious help.

wocp5• 12 years ago

I did choose PHP because lots of servers support the language, so more people will can use the script.

krapp• 12 years ago

I am too.

I've found a few methods for rendering trees from SQL, and I find that Stack Overflow is your friend here. The method that seems to work best to me is closure tables - although it's complex, you'll find implementations available. Essentially you need two tables, one for items (in my implementation, which is not online), this is currently only storing name, date, comment, etc - essentially, find the depth of the parent and ++) and another table separately to handle the relationships and build the tree.

If you want to limit comment depth, one way to do that is to keep track of the depth of comments by incrementing a value for each comment (the root comment has depth 0, replies have depth 1, replies to replies have depth 2, etc.) Although this method may lead to anomalies in the data.

You shouldn't need extremely complex recursion, however, as far as I know, apart from self-joins in the database itself. Before using closure tables, I was using a basic method where every item stored its own parent, and a reference to the root post, and this worked except getting an entire tree took multiple queries. (and to be fair, I am not exactly a rocket scientist when it comes to SQL)

Also - ignore whoever downthread tries to criticize you for using PHP. This is about as basic a CRUD app as you can make, as long as you're not doing anything crazy like using the mysql_* functions and concatenating strings, then it mostly shouldn't matter.

I'm building a HN clone in PHP, and I need help

Related Stories