Creating a dashboard feature for my website - php

Question

I'm creating a dashboard feature for my website. I'm having trouble getting it sorted correctly. The dashboard will contain all of the recent status updates of the people who they are following. I'm using MySQL and PHP for this.
Status Table:
id: key value, auto-increments
user: the username of the poster of the status
status: the actual status that was posted
date: an int value, has the time that the status was posted
Users table: (Unneeded rows are excluded)
username: The user's name
following: All of the users that he is following. This is a text field, and is delimited by semicolons.
It needs to be sorted by the date posted. The reason I'm having trouble is because I have to get the people who the user is following. Any help?

Answer 1

Here i will have a go. I had to change sql tables slightly
Heres SQL:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `status` (
`id` int(3) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_id` int(3) NOT NULL,
`user_status` text NOT NULL,
`date` date NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;
INSERT INTO `status` (`id`, `user_id`, `user_status`, `date`) VALUES
(1, 1, 'Hi, Im Dave, User One.', '2012-05-03'),
(2, 2, 'Hi, Im Amy, User Two.', '2012-05-01'),
(3, 3, 'Hi, Im Lisa user 3', '2012-05-01'),
(4, 4, 'Hi, Im Joe user 4', '2012-05-02');
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` (
`id` int(3) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`username` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`following` text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;
INSERT INTO `users` (`id`, `username`, `following`) VALUES
(1, 'Dave', '2:3'),
(2, 'Amy', '1:4'),
(3, 'Lisa', '1:4'),
(4, 'Joe', '1:2:3');
and heres is the php (this presumes you have already connected to the database):
// Get user 2 (id 2) details from user table
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id='2'");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
$username = $row['username'];
$following = $row['following'];
}
if(!empty($following)) {
$data = explode(':',$following);
foreach($data as $user){
// Now get user 2 (id 2) followers statuses
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM status WHERE user_id='$user'");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
echo $user_status = $row['user_status'].'<br>';
echo $date = $row['date'].'<br>';
}
}
}
I tested and it seems to work just fine
hope it is what you need :)