Question

Apologies for another question on a similar topic, but I’m inexperienced at this level of database development.

I have a project in which users join projects, a page where content is loaded dynamically from a MySQL database. I’ve been exploring foreign keys and the like to deal with the many-to-many aspects of having several users to a project and vice versa, but where should all of the content that is loaded into each project be stored? Amongst other things, I have a chat window and a place to upload and download files.

Answer 1

This might be what you are looking for

Project
id
proejectName
startDate
endDate
title
description
[... basically all project specific content]

ProjectParticipant
userId
projectId

User
id
username
email
[... basically all user specific content]

ProjectParticipant is a many-to-many table, linking the user to the project and vice versa.

EDIT:

If you want to represent project specifc files or project specific comments then you need to create seperate tables for these things because one project has many comments and one project most likely also got many files. So you could create two tables like the following:

ProjectComment
id
projectId (references the id of the project table)
authorId (references the id of the user table)
comment
created_at

ProjectFile
id
projectId (references the id of the project table)
fileLocation 
uploadedBy (references the id of the user table)

Hope this helps.