php mysql Group By to get latest record, not first record

It's not very beautiful , but it works:

SELECT * FROM (SELECT  post_id, forum_id, topic_id FROM posts
ORDER BY post_time DESC) as temp
GROUP BY topic_id

If you select attributes that are not used in the group clause, and are not aggregates, the result is unspecified. I.e you don't know which rows the other attributes are selected from. (The sql standard does not allow such queries, but MySQL is more relaxed).

The query should then be written e.g. as

SELECT post_id, forum_id, topic_id
FROM posts p
WHERE post_time =
  (SELECT max(post_time) FROM posts p2
   WHERE p2.topic_id = p.topic_id
   AND p2.forum_id = p.forum_id)
GROUP BY forum_id, topic_id, post_id
ORDER BY post_time DESC
LIMIT 5;

or

SELECT post_id, forum_id, topic_id FROM posts
NATURAL JOIN
(SELECT forum_id, topic_id, max(post_time) AS post_time
 FROM posts
 GROUP BY forum_id, topic_id) p
ORDER BY post_time
LIMIT 5;