Best Practice for layout items at one page

[davihigh]

Hello all,

I am looking for a neat and best practice way to layout a number of
items (say, no more than 16 records) in one page, fill in a 4x4 grid.
The most clear way is using <tableto display HTML. But the number of
records is variable, so how i can program to render HTML code
correctly? For example, if we have 5 records, it should appear 4 items
at first row, and 1 item at second row. so on.
I am new to PHP and PHP template, so i wanna start from this point to
get more understand of PHP. I have also read book <Programming PHPbut
there is no obvious answer of this.

$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM item", $connection);
........

Expecting your great reponse. Thanks!
Regards,
David

[Cliff Smith]

da******@gmail.com wrote:

Hello all,

I am looking for a neat and best practice way to layout a number of
items (say, no more than 16 records) in one page, fill in a 4x4 grid.
The most clear way is using <tableto display HTML. But the number of
records is variable, so how i can program to render HTML code
correctly? For example, if we have 5 records, it should appear 4 items
at first row, and 1 item at second row. so on.
I am new to PHP and PHP template, so i wanna start from this point to
get more understand of PHP. I have also read book <Programming PHPbut
there is no obvious answer of this.

$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM item", $connection);
.......

Expecting your great reponse. Thanks!
Regards,
David

Don't know if it would be "best practice", but this would work-

$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM item", $connection);
$num_results = mysql_num_rows($result);
$num_rows = ceil($num_results/4);

for( $row=0; $row<$num_rows; $row++ ){
echo '<tr>';
for( $col=0; $col<4; $col++ ) {
$data = @mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo '<td>';
.....
do some stuff with the data
.....
echo '&nbsp;</td>'; // the &nbsp; is important for // when no
data is returned
}
echo '</tr>';
}

[davihigh]

Great! That's really what i am looking for and it actually works!

But not enough :-) If i am understand correctly, this is some PHP code
which bind in HTML, if the HTML will be change, the PHP code also need
to be change to output HTML.
So, is there a neat way to write in using 'template'? Let me write some
pesduocode to explain what i am looking for:
<TR php:if (count%4==0)>
<TD php:if (result[count])>
<A href=php:(result[count]["field_image1_url"])></A>


"Cliff Smith wrote:

Don't know if it would be "best practice", but this would work-

$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM item", $connection);
$num_results = mysql_num_rows($result);
$num_rows = ceil($num_results/4);

for( $row=0; $row<$num_rows; $row++ ){
echo '<tr>';
for( $col=0; $col<4; $col++ ) {
$data = @mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo '<td>';
.....
do some stuff with the data
.....
echo '&nbsp;</td>'; // the &nbsp; is important for //