Change record at midnight each day

I have a website that displays featured items along with all items. I've been asked to have the featured item automatically rotate at midnight each day. Is this possible? And, if so any ideas on how to do this?

Hi Jedi,

I would consider something like....

In your products table you will need a column to flag if the product is to be shown on the home page.

Then, create a PHP page that does the following:

1. Sets all the home page flags to 0
2. Has a recordset that randomly pulls back one product
3. Use Data Assist Update to set the home page flag to 1

You would then need to setup a Cron job on your server to run this script every day at Midnight.

Hope that helps?

Cheers
Ian

Thanks Ian. I probably didn't explain what I wanted very clearly. I have a database set up for products with a table row that flags some products as featured items. Now on my pages I pull in a record to display all products with some being deals and others being regular special pricing. Above these is a featured list of products that currently displays only one featured product but orders them randomly so that each time the page is refreshed a new featured product appears. Now, what I was hoping I could do was replace my sql query that pulls the featured products randomly but instead pull them so that each day a different product is featured. I am not so good with the cron job and I was hoping for just a sql query to do this. Is this possible?

Hmm, that might be a little more tricky as the SQL query will produce the random function each time it is run, rather than on what day it is run. I don't think you would be able to do that with a SQL query.

More than likely, you would need to create a new table in your database that acted as a diary. Each row of the diary would contain a date and a link to a product. This data would then be used to pull back the relevant product for that day.

That is the only way I can see you doing this....

Without using a cron job, I guess the easiest solution would be to add "a day" to each product. Then select the product of the day with a SQL-Statement using of the current date with now() and LIMIT 1.

You can add a random date to the product as well by using a php script when inserting or updating into the database table. Also you could export the product list to Excel and add the random date to each product as an initial start there.

I did something similar with an advent calendar.

Hope that helps.