Re: news and article posts in one table

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 01:26:49PM -0600, Tamara Temple wrote: > muad shibani <muad.shibani@gmail.com> wrote: > > > i wanna to create one table that contains both news and articles posts, > > they have similar columns like id, title, content, and date but they are > > differ in one column = the source of news or article post > > article has writers that have permanent names and pictures obtained from > > another table called writers that supposed to be left joined with the news > > table, while news posts simply have a source as text like AFP > > or Reuters and so one. > > > > How I can solve this ? > > How you store things in tables can sometimes get a little tricky. One > way to approach this is with normalized tables and using joins in your > query like you are doing. To make this work, in your main entries table, > have a field that indicates what the entry type is. If you are doing one > select that gets both articles and news stories, having that extra field > can help you distinguish what type it is, and which fields contain data > in each record. > > (cf: Wordpress wp_posts table for an example of how this is done. They > store posts, pages, and attachments in a single table this way. I can't > say if this is a better arrangement than keeping them in separate > tables.) I've had to hack this table. It's a prime example of bad design. Take a long look at the records of this table in an active blog, with a survey of each of the fields and their values. You'll see what I mean. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com