22.2.5     Building a better guestbook

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What we've built so far is a fairly simple, yet workable guestbook. Although you can post and read messages and also have bad words/HTML content stripped out, it still leaves a lot to be desired. If you are interested in expanding your guestbook, consider these ideas:

• Enable moderation of posts, where all posts need to be vetted by a moderator then approved. The easiest way to do this would be to have a field, IsVisible, set to 0 (invisible) for all new posts, then have it set to 1 (visible) when approved - you can simply filter for IsVisible = 1 in read.php

• Make it have multiple pages if the guestbook gets too long, e.g. "Messages 1-100", "Messages 101-200", "Messages 201 to 299", etc. The easy way to achieve this is to use the LIMIT clause in your SELECT query for read.php and store a variable like $start. For example: SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY DateSubmitted DESC LIMIT $start, 100;

• Have a preview message option that will show how the poster's entry would look if added to the database.

• Allow visitors to edit or delete their post. This might sound tricky, but really all you need to do is ask people to enter a password as part of the entry submission form - if they select to edit or delete an entry, they need to provide the matching password to proceed.

Guestbooks are so often frowned upon by web veterans as being for newbies only, which is rubbish - there is so much you can do with a simple guestbook that it is a great place to sharpen your skills.