Question

New to PHP/MySQL and building a CMS. I need to know how to associated an Article with multiple Categories eg “My Article 1” has to be in 3 categories and “My Article 2” has to be in only 2 etc.

It’s basically just the table set up to begin with. Here’s what I have:

Table = articles
Fields = id, publicationDate, title, summary, content

Table = categories
Fields = id, categoryTitle

I know a little about joins and relationships etc but I want to get this right from the start.

Answer 1

You need a third table, called articles_to_categories or whatever, with two fields:

• article_id
• category_id

Add an entry for each article and category association. Set the PK to be both columns.