Re: blog design issue...

Hi, > I know you are all probably thinking "What does this have to do with PHP?" > and in reality... It's probably stretching it a little bit... BUT I am in > the process of writing a blog software (Yes I'm aware of all the open > source, and paid stuff out there... I'm doing this to learn :)) I am looking > at adding "categories" to my blog posts so I can organize my drivel into > something that looks somewhat professional, or at the very least, organized > so you can filter out all the crap... > > What I'm wondering about though, is would it be better from a database > design stand point to do a database field for "categories" and then in there > put "Personal", "Business", "Crap I found funny"  Basically 1 > database field > for all the categories I decide to use. OR should I go the other route and > do 1 database field for each category? > > This is going to be a small blog to start, but I guess I should always be > looking at performance, security, & maintainability right? > > I did read the post that tedd put up about looking at storing variables > differently and am considering going that route... But just wanted to know > what you all think :) > > Oh.... I'm also not expecting to have more then 4 or 5 categories at the > most.... Unless I release the blog to the public and take wordpress down :P You could use a SET field type. Internally MySQL uses numbers (a bit mask IIRC) for them. Though you will be limited to 32 categories. Eg: Categories table: ID Name ============ 1 Personal 2 Business 4 Crap I found funny Articles table: ID Title Category ======================= 1 My first blog entry 1 2 A joke from work 6 3 A joke from home 5 4 A joke 4 The numbers are bitwise sums of the corresponding category IDs. eg.4&2=6. I think. MySQL has some built in functions for dealing with sets, like FIND_IN_SET() IIRC, which make life a lot easier. -- Richard Heyes HTML5 canvas graphing: RGraph - http://www.rgraph.net (updated 13th March) Lots of PHP and Javascript code - http://www.phpguru.org