MYSQL retrieve data from two tables

Question

I am trying to make a small discussion system where people can login and post a discussion. On the homepage I want to show the discussions.

First I retrieve the data for the discussions (topic, category, username, etc) from the table 'discussions'and order them by 'date_time'.

I put these values in div's that are working just how I want it. The problem I am having now is to show the avatar of the user. The avatars are stored in a table 'users' under the column 'avatar'.

So I need to retrieve the value from the column 'avatar' in the table 'users' where 'username' matches the username of the discussion.

This is the code that I have now but it's not working. I have tried different things but I am not very familiar yet with PHP so I don't really know how to go from here.

Thanks in advance!

$result = mysql_query("SELECT 
        topic, 
        category, 
        date_time, 
        username, 
        SUBSTRING(discussion, 1, 80) AS discussion 
    FROM discussions 
    ORDER BY date_time DESC");  
while($record = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
?>
<div class="discusscolumn">
    <div>
        <p><? echo $record['category'] . ":  <b>" . $record['topic'] . "</b>"?></p>
    </div>
    <div>
    <?php
        $discussion_username=$record['username'];
        $getavatar = mysql_query("SELECT avatar, username FROM users WHERE username='$discussion_username' ");
        $avatarrecord = mysql_fetch_array($getavatar);
        echo'<span class="smallpic"><img src="user/'.$record['username'].'/'.$getavatar['avatar'].'"></span>'; 
    ?>
    </div>
    <div>
        <p>Posted by <? echo "<a href='user.php?u=".$record['username']."'>".$record['username'] ?> </a></p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <p><br><? echo $record['discussion'] ?>&nbsp...</p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <p><? echo $record['date_time'] ?></p>
    </div>
    <div><a href="#">Discuss</a></div>
</div>
<?php } ?>

PS: I know I am working with mysql instead of mysqli and that I'm mixing HTML and PHP code but I just want the basics to work now.

Answer 1

Please check your img source(src) , that you have passed as user/username/avatar instead of passing like this please put url like http://www.w3schools.com/images/w3schools_green.jpg so that you will be getting out . But in your case you need to have all your user image in some other global storage area for eg.Amazon s3 bucket , and you need to get string from database construct like above url and append that in img src inside input tag