Question

Im working on simple PHP CMS system and Im stuck with database design.

This is the problem.

I have table named pages, it holds all pages I can add and information about this page like page_url, page_order etc..

Now… Every page can be either webpage that can hold some html content. But it can also be a Blog or anything else. There can be only one blog page. And Blog on the other hand can have blog posts and blog categories.

Simply put, I have pages table that represents all pages I can create.
And every page can be different, it can be webpage, blog module, guestbook, contacts page.

And every page will have different purpose.

So the problem is how to design this?

Now this may not be clear at this moment, but here is my current design so maybe it will be easier to grasp what Im trying to achive:

pages
    page_id
    page_name
    page_url
    ...

webpages
    webpage_id
    page_id
    webpage_content
    webpage_date_created
    ...

blogs
    blog_id
    page_id
    ...

blog_posts
    blog_post_id
    blog_post_title
    blog_post_content
    ...

blog_categories
    blog_category_id
    blog_category_name
    blog_category_url
    ...

So, I have pages table that holds all pages, but those pages can be either webpage(simple “static” webpage) or it can be blog, and blog can have posts, categories etc…

So now, if I come to the page which id belongs to webpages template, I joust fetch content and stuff i need and hand it back to controller and the view.

And if I come to the page which id belongs to blog, then I fetch latest posts and show that to the user.

And latter I would like to extend pages so page can be guestbook or anything else.
Basicly, I need database design where pages would be stored in pages table, and each page can be seperate module that would be presented on different way.

Is this the way to go like I described above? Or could it be done better?
Am I doing something wrong here?

Answer 1

There doesn’t seem to be anything fundamentally wrong here – you’re using object-oriented conventions, which I can’t encourage enough. If I understand, all of your pages will be listed in the PAGES table, and then will be connected by PAGE_ID to their appropriate category?

This allows you to continue to add different page types if you so choose, as well as keep a single list of all of the pages present on your site.

The only thing I would add, is perhaps a ‘type’ column in your pages table. Even though you’d be able to determine this by running a page_id query on the other (blog and webpage) tables, it might make your life easier in the long-run if you’re interested in really scaling and being able to gather a quick since of your application makeup (25% static pages, etc, etc).

This layout also would allow you to combine types (if a page_id was present in the blog and webpage tables) you could introduce some static content while also dropping in your dynamic blog features.

Looks good to me:)