Querying a MySQL database with PHP - Random Quotes

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require careful study to understand. I recommend a book by Larry Ullman called PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites. Somehow, without reading this book, I managed to get a PHP script to work that I found somewhere on the MT forums. However, I had no idea how it worked. So after reading the book on a long airplane flight and comparing what I learned to the script I had, I created a new, simplified script to generate random quotations. There are several other, probably easier, methods to generate random quotations. The script detailed here is an example of how a PHP script that queries a MySQL database functions and should be regarded in that context.

Here is an example of the script in action. Refresh the browser to see a new quote.