Question

I am building a CMS for editing page content. I would like to make it as flexible as possible, as each page will contain a variable amount of sections.

Currently, I have the following:

Table page:
===========
id
name

Table page_section:
===================
id
page_id
name
display_order

Table page_section_sub:
=======================
id
page_section_id
name
content

I thought this structure would work well, until I realised there is a lot of repetitive data and it’s not the ideal way to pull specific data out.

For example, the name field in table page_section_sub is meant to store the field label for the form. Here is a sample data:

Table page_section:
===================

id  page_id     name
-----------------------------------------
1   1           Slideshow Slide 1
2   1           Slideshow Slide 2
3   1           Slideshow Slide 3
4   1           Middle Box
5   1           Bottom Box


Table page_section_sub:
=======================

id  page_section_id name                content
------------------------------------------------------
1   1               Heading             ...
2   1               First Paragraph     ...
3   1               Second Paragraph    ...
4   2               Heading             ...
5   2               First Paragraph     ...
6   2               Second Paragraph    ...
7   3               Heading             ...
8   3               First Paragraph     ...
9   3               Second Paragraph    ...
10  4               Image URL           ...
11  5               Image URL           ...

Now on the front end I want to display the 3 slideshows and their related content from the above table. This is proving to be very tedious.

I know I can create another table with separate columns for “Heading”, “First Paragraph” and “Second Paragraph”, but as I mentioned I need this system to be flexible and take in to account any number of columns.

How can I improve the structure of this database so I can easily output this data on the front end and also modify it on the back end?

EDIT: This is what I want to do in my front end:

<?php while($row = mysql_fetch_array($slideshow)) { ?>
<div class="slideshow">
    <h1><?php echo $row['heading']; ?></h1>
    <p class="first"><?php echo $row['first']; ?></p>
    <p class="second"><?php echo $row['second']; ?></p>
</div>
<?php } ?>

But of course those actual $row columns don’t exist in the table.. In the back end however I need to be able to edit the above 11 rows on one page.

Answer 1

From your description it would seem like you could do it with just ‘pages’ and ‘content’. Im not sure why you have the ‘section_sub’.

pages: 
   Page ID
   Content ID
   Content ID
   Content ID
   ...

Content:
   Content ID
   Content Heading
   Content Text

Each content row could have columns for “show heading”, “font”, etc

EDIT: example data

Content:
    ID0, Slide0 header, slide0 text
    ID1, Slide1 header, slide1 text
    ID2, Slide2 header, slide2 text
    ID3, RepetitiveHeader0, RepetitiveText0
    ID4, Repetitiveheader1, RepetitiveText1
    ID5, RepetitiveHeader2, RepetitiveText2

 Pages:
    Page0, Title0
    Page1, Title1
    Page2, Title2

Now that Im looking at this – the way I have at the top (with multiple ContentID sections in the Page table) – is more of a NoSQL solution. You can accomplish the same thing in a MySQL solution by adding a table as follows:

  PageContent:
    PageID
    ContentID
    PageOrder

Entries to build a specific page would be like:

  Page0, ContentID0, (order)1
  Page0, ContentID3, (order)2
  Page0, ContentID4, (order)3
  Page1, ContentID1, (order)1
  Page1, ContentID4, (order)2
  Page1, ContentID5, (order)3

To build a specific page you’d select for the PageId joined to the PageContent then joined to the Content itself and order by PageOrder.