Frog CMS

OK. Thought I’d try to contribute something useful for a change! :)

Here’s what I did: first, googled! And found an article on randomizing an array in PHP. That gave me the basis for the following:

• create a hidden page as child-of-homepage called “Random Article”; since I use the cache plugin, I needed to set the “Is cacheable” drop-down to no;

• as the content of this new “Random Article” page, I used this code:

<?php $randomArticles = $this->find('/articles/');
  $value = $randomArticles->children(array());
  $rand_key=array_rand($value,2);
  $randArticle = $value[$rand_key[0]];

  echo "<h4>".$randArticle->title()."</h4>";
  if ($randArticle->hasContent('extended')) { 
    echo $randArticle->content('body'); echo $randArticle->content('extended'); 
    } else {
    echo $randArticle->content();
  } 
  echo "<p><em>Permanent link</em>: ".$randArticle->link()."</p>";
?>

• on my Homepage, I added this little link underneath the “recent articles” list:

Or read a <a href="<?php echo URL_PUBLIC; ?>random-article">random article</a>!

Done! You can see the results if you like. The Random Article code above doesn’t include comments, but you could include that if you like. Or readers can click the “Permanent link” to get the full picture.

There are probably other more elegant, more random ways of doing this. But for “quick-and-dirty”, I hope that’s a help. (Plus: more info on array_rand here.)

Sorry, Matteo. I thought the question was how to “select random an article from DB” — someone else will have to help you with the more specific question! :)