Check DB - show message, or something else

ok so i have this code:

PHP Code:

---

<?php
     $sr_no=$sr_no+1;
     $sql="select * from member_friends a, journal b where b.journal_of = a.friend_id and a.member_id = $_SESSION[member_id] order by journal_id desc limit 0,8";
     $friend_res=mysql_query($sql);
     print mysql_error();
     while($data_set=mysql_fetch_array($friend_res))
     {
?>
<tr bordercolor="#666666">
<?php
     $name=$people->get_name($data_set["journal_of"]);
?>
<td width="29%" height="23" align="left" bgcolor="D5E8FB" class='txt_label'>
  <div align="left"><a href='view_profile.php?member_id=<?=$data_set["journal_of"]?>'>
    <?=$name?>
  </a></div></td>
<td width="28%" height="23" align="left" bgcolor="D5E8FB" class='txt_label'>
  
    <div align="left">
      <?=$data_set["journal_date"]?>
      <br>
      </div></td>
<td width="43%" height="23" valign="center" bgcolor="D5E8FB" style="word-wrap:break-word">
<span class="txt_label">
<div align="left"><a href='view_journal.php?journal_id=<?=$data_set["journal_id"]?>'>
  <?=stripslashes($data_set["subject"])?>
</a></div></td>
</tr>
<?php
       $sr_no=$sr_no+1;
}
?>
</table>
<div align="center"><br>
    <br>
    <?php
    if($sr_no==1)
    {
?>
    <span class="txt_label style1">You do not have any bulletins yet.</span><br>
  <span class="blacktext10nb">
    Bulletins are messages from and to all your friends at once. You can use bulletins to alert your friends about a party, things for sale, job hunts, etc.
  <br>
  <br>
    </span>
    <?php
    }
?>

---

and sometimes we may need that to be unavalible to the users. How do i have it ceck the db if there is anything in the field "message". If there is anything in it then it displays it. if not. it shows the code normaly.

umm. are there multiple records in the table? if you want to check if the table is empty, use mysql_num_rows() before you call mysql_fetch_array() with the loop. something like this:

PHP Code:

---

<?php
  $myquery = "SELECT * FROM blah WHERE blah=blah LIMIT 5";
  $query = mysql_query($myquery);
  $num = mysql_num_rows($query);
  if($num > 0){
    //found messages, display them
    while($results = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
      echo 'record information';
    }
  }else{
    //result was empty, display the "no messages" message.
  }
?>

---

was that what you wanted?

i dont think that is what i am looking for. i started adding it to my code and it did not look right.

I want it to:
1. Check "bulletin_message".
--(this is diffrent from where the bulltetins are stored)
2. If there is anything in the column "message" then display the message not the code that i put above
3. if thereis nothing in the column, then display the code above.

then you can just do this:

PHP Code:

---

<?php
  $impbulletin_sql = "SELECT bulletin_message FROM table";
  $impbulletin_query = mysql_query($impbulletin_sql);
  $impbulletin = mysql_fetch_array($impbulletin_query);
  if(isset($impbulletin['bulletin_message']) && $impbulletin['bulletin_message'] != ""){
    //print your important message
  }else{
    //no important bulletin found, print the rest of the normal messages
    $sql = "select * from blah where blah";
    //you do the rest. normal code goes here
  }
?>

---

alternatively, I would say it'd be rather annoying as a user of your site to not be able to view any "normal" bulletin messages when an "important" bulletin was displayed.. so, I would suggest you just made the important bulletin display at the top if there is one, while also displaying the other less important/normal messages just underneath it. you could tack on a "important" or make the text size for the important message bigger, or whatever.

well this is for an onine community that i am working on. Some guy bought the script and it looks too much like myspace so we are changing it. And sometimes we have errors with the bulletin system and we need to close it. Insted of going into the code and changing it to what we want. we want to have an option in the admin section to tunr it on/off.

Thanks for the code!