The captcha presents a new kind of task. In my research I found it best to have php use its built in image generating capabilities to produce the captcha. Since it has to be random every time an online resource recommend that I encrypt the current time and then take part of that to be the text and numbers of the captcha text. From there I would have to create a script to generate colors and a random background. Then in the contact form I would have to set the image source as the external php image generating script. The current time would be gathered from php on the contact page and then set to a variable. The variable would have to passed along in a session to the external php image generator to encrypt and then convert to image. Also, when the time is encrypted and cut down to 5 digits it would have to be saved in a variable to match to the text placed in the box. Then if they match then the rest of the error checking could proceed.
This next query is much more complicated. First the query would have to go to the messages table and get all of the variables. Then if it had been replied to also get the reply_id and the emp_id from the reply table, and then go to the employee’s table and get the employee’s name. I plan to do this by running a query for multiple tables and then running a join querey for the emp_id from the reply table and the emp_id from the employees table. Then from there continue to do the loop and populate the table.