Unread posts via database

  • I want my registered visitors to see whether they’ve read a post or not. Like email programms mark unread emails. It’s important to me that this is database driven.
    If there isn’t such a plugin already I’ll probably write one. I wanted to check that first though. Anyone?

    My idea is to fill a table each time an author publishes a new post. One row per registered visitor with the visitors ID and the post-ID. When the visitor reads the post (or by clicking the unread-icon beside the post) the row will be deleted from the table. Of course there should also be some kind of “mark all posts as read”-button/link. Do you think this would work fine? Any suggestions?

    Michael

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  • Darned if I can remember where, but I know there’s a “since your last visit” type plugin out there. Cookie based, I think. Maybe at alex king’s site?

    Your db driven approach could work, but has some challenges. It appears you’ll add a record for each registered user for each post as it is created, right? So 100 users, you add 100 records on your next post. Now, 10 posts later, user 101 registers… Are you going to catch that and add 10 records for the 10 previous posts that were made before they registered?

    If you don’t have many users planned, you can probably make it work. But over time, if users aren’t keeping up that table could grow really really large!

    Thread Starter michael3384

    (@michael3384)

    Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, there is a cookie based plugin, but I often work on seperate computers, at home, at my college and so on.
    It’s probably not the best manner for blogs with many registered user, but for my specific usage it should be fine. I’m working on a private group-blog for me and my friends, about 15 people overall.
    In order to keep the table small I could delete entries older than a configurable amount of days, 30 or so.
    Anyone else with the need for such a plugin and feature wishes/suggestions?

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