New Messages since last Login, etc

[ChiSamurai]

Hi everyone,

searching for clues or hints to solve my problems for several days now, I decided to bother the SMF community

First let me explain the situation. I am working on a kind of CMS, based on SMF. So I integrated several functions from the SSI.php like ssi_login() and ssi_logout() which works fine. But there are some functions I need which are not supported by SSI.php.

First of all, I want to integrate a "There are X new Posts in the Forum"-Message at the index page of the site (after Login off course), but the ssi_recentTopics() only returns the newest X posts. For sure I could compare the post-dates with the user-login-date ([$user_info['last_login']), but I'm sure there is a better way to do.

Second problem is the marking/highlighting of new content on the homepage if a user sets his session-length to "keep logged in" so the session will not be automatically closed. In this case the $user_info['last_login'] will not change on the next visit on the page. There has to be a variable which contains the timestamp of the last action on the forum/page so I can compare it with the timestamp of the new content. But I can't find out where this one is stored.

Hope anyone could help me.

Many thanks,
Samurai

[SlammedDime]

For your first question, you may want to look at SMF's function for unread topics (action=unread).  You could copy the query, but instead of SELECTing any fields, you could do a SELECT COUNT(*) and just get the number of results that would be returned, should they visit that page.

For your second question, there is no variable that holds such a value.  When they login, or return to the board, you could possibly do a database query on the log_mark_read table in Load.php to see the last message they read on the forum get it's time, and use that as your reference point and store that to the $user_settings or $user_info array.