I've been working on my online photo/video album for the past year now. I originally had all the Main Categories/Picture Categories information witihin a single flat file (all set up within arrays). This was all fine and dandy until I wanted to start setting up sub categories (an example - a sub category for the pic category of July 4th (the sub category would branch to 2002, 2003, etc...). The site was primarily coded in Javascript and HTML. Things were getting a little hairy recently and I was about to give up. It was becoming more of a pain in the @ss to work with this now enormous flat file because I had picture captions that would appear in the picture window below the picture.
I don't want to stop my never ending project. So I thought about making a MySQL database which would be nice because I could make an admin page that could call up individual records to edit them if need be, as well as adding/deleting photos to the archive. So I decided to pick up PHP as another language.
I really like PHP and what it has to offer. I have a book (PHP Fast and Easy Web Development) that I've been learning from. I've gone through 2/3s of the book within 5 days. The concepts are fairly similar to other languages which makes this pretty easy to pick up.
Ok, enough rambling... Here is what I am asking help on... I never worked on a database before. I've worked through the examples in the book with no problems... But I am having issues visualizing what I need to do in order to set up an efficient database for my online photo/video album.
1) How many tables would I need?
2) Can all the info (Main Categories/Picture Categories/Sub Categories) reside in one table, or would that need to be split up.
3) What would be the link from Main Category to Sub Category (some ID?).
Any help you can provide would greatly be appreciated. Sorry for the rather long email, but I wanted to be as descriptive as possible. If more information is needed, please let me know.
Much thanks in advance!
-SlickVic78