hi guys, please help me on this one:)
Most of the time I am creating static pages like Contact Us, About Us, FAQs etc
If I want to store some dynamic items in the page, how will my table look like?
Let's say for the FAQ page, I am to store the question and the answer on the database. For the contact page, I will store emails and and some other contact information. Does that mean I have to create a separate table for each?
You could just have 1 table which has a page id column and a page content column. The page id being different for each page you want to store in the database. And the page content column can be a text field which contains the HTML you want to display on that page. Then on each page you would query the database passing the parameter for the page content you wanted to display.
Often times I've seen people create a table for Meta information. It resembles a key => value relationship, where the first field of a row is the name and the second is the value. So if you were to manage your global contact information in the database, you may have the following rows:
Meta ID | MetaTitle | Meta Value
---------------------------------------------------------
01 | email_address | [email protected]
02 | phone_number | 1.234.567.8901
03 | num_subscribers | 2312
04 | page_styles | background-color:#333333;color:#ffffff
As for your frequently asked questions, you could do that as a table, if you like:
Question ID | Question | Answer
-------------------------------------------
01 | How tall are you? | Not nearly tall enough.
Or you could simply create a generic 'pages' table:
Page ID | Page Title | Page Content
--------------------------------------------
01 | FAQs | How tall are you?
| | Not nearly tall enough.
--------------------------------------------
02 | Contact Us | Phone: 1.234.567.8901
| | Email: [email protected]
Based on the information provided, yes - it's quite likely you'll need separate tables.
Tables are just groupings of similar information, and email doesn't relate to questions & answers. With more information about what you're looking to do, and any business rules around it, we can help you with structure if you'd like.