how to make an activity list with php

[MarkFL]

Are you wanting to create a new forum block to contain this information?

I would begin with a query of the "activitystream" table, sorting by dateline in descending order, so that the newest activity is listed first. You will likely want to limit the result to a maximum number of rows.

Then, within a while loop that retrieves each row from the returned array, I would use a switch statement on the typeid to determine which table needs to be queried to get the desired content and base the format of that activity accordingly.