I need PHP!

I recently blogged about the relatively new XMLHttpRequest functions and how they can enhance the web browsing experience if used correctly.

I've used this technology to solve the forum marker quagmire that has plagued most bulletin boards since the dawn of time. Currently, IPB uses a mixture of methods to cobble together some kind of logic which is mixed between topics read, and topics posted since your last visit and stores the forum marker dates in a cookie. I won't go into why we do it like this but even after 4 years of writing bulletin boards I couldn't think of a better way of doing it without complex caches or queries.

Enter XMLHttpRequest!

I've done away with the cookies for a start and written an extra field in the member's table to store a serialized array of forum IDs and the last marked time. I've also done away with the "new posts since your last visit" confusion and all we're interested in now is purely unread topics.

Now, when you click on a topic link from the forum view (in other words, when you get the list of topics) an onclick handler checks to see how many topics in that display are newer than the last known marked time. If there is only one unread topic left in that display and its the one you just clicked on, an XMLHttpRequest is sent to the PHP engine which updates the member's serialized array in the database table.

Of course, there are a few cavaets. One being that if you have any unread topics on pages 2 or more, the forum will still be marked as read and if you click on the "last topic" from the board index, it won't mark the forum as read - however, its still a massive improvement and with a few other tweaks I'm going to make, manual forum marking should be a thing of the past.

Rikki and I have been bouncing ideas back and forth for most of the day and although the IPB 2.1 development schedule doesn't permit most of what we've thought up, IPB 3.0 should be a really nifty release.