Question

I have a database table with 6 fields that holds information about restaurants:
id
name
type
category_1
category_2
category_3

There are three “types” of restaurants: gold, silver, and bronze. Gold restaurants are featured on all 3 of their category pages (category_1, category_2, and category_3). Silver restaurants are featured on their top two categories (category_1 and category_2). Bronze restaurants are featured on their first category only (category_1). On my category pages, I need to display all restaurants in those categories, but Feature the restaurants who qualify to be featured (ie, they need to be listed at the top). I’m not sure how to do this with PHP / MySQL. I can query restaurants in the categories just fine, but how do I tell it to put Featured restaurants at the top? This is what I would need to do on the category “Mexican”:

Display all mexican restaurants. Promote Gold restaurants that have “Mexican” listed in any of their category fields, Promote Silver restaurants that have “Mexican” in their top two category fields, and promote Bronze restaurants that have “Mexican” in it’s top category field.

I’ve been thinking of many different ways to do this and can’t figure it out.

Answer 1

This should help you out with your existing table structure.
I’m assuming type contains bronze, silver, and gold in this query.

SELECT * FROM restaurants 
WHERE category_1 = 'Mexican' 
  OR (category_2 = 'Mexican' AND type in ('silver','gold'))
  OR (category_3 = 'Mexican' AND type = 'gold')
ORDER BY Field(type,'gold','silver','bronze'), name asc;