Are you an absolute beginner to PHP? If so have a read at some beginner tutorials first and learn the basics, such as selection, iteration, variables, mysql, retrieving form data.
What you describe is a very simple web application, you could probably find a complete exampleof a guestbook if you search a bit.
Anyway, what I would recommend for this is a MySQL database to store the messages.
E.g. a table called 'posts' with columns: id (int), message (varchar), from (varchar), posted_on (datetime), ip_address (varchar).
PHP is very good at working with MySQL. Have a search for how to insert/retrive rows from mysql.
When retreiving the timestamp of the message, use the MySQL DATE_FORMAT() function to format the timestamp to hh:mm.
I would get it all working first, then add image verification (captcha), here's how:
http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/us...rification.php
Finally to get the time to live functionality, that depends on your hosting, is it a Linux server, windows?
If it's a Linux server, create a cron job, see 'crontab', that will call one of your PHP scripts after a specified interval e.g. every 24hrs which will run a query on the database to delete all the posts that are older than 24hrs.
If it's a windows server you can use scheduled tasks to do the same - however shared hosting may not give you access to this.
In answer to your question, yes it is very easy and very possible.
Hope this helps
Originally Posted by the182guy
Are you an absolute beginner to PHP? If so have a read at some beginner tutorials first and learn the basics, such as selection, iteration, variables, mysql, retrieving form data.
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