Question

I am creating a forum for practice but I am stuck on how to do the topics. Do I need a seperate topic table, and If yes why, cant I just check them in the posts table?

Also, do I record the topic id or the topic name, and if it is the Id, how do I switch them?

Thanks a lot, I am working in PHP

Answer 1

you have to create topics table separate with unique id this should be like this

Topic_id  |   topic_name
1         |   PHP
2         |   Ajax


Post_table
id | topic_id | Post_Title | Post_Detail
1  |  2       |  title     |   post detail text
2  |  1       |  title     |   post detail text

and when you are showing posts on pages so you have to do it in mysql_query

Why we use separate table for topics because if 3 post related to topic php and 5 posts related to topic ajax so we can figure our actual data calculation. and best is this do it with separate tables.