Changing menus for a CMS

[Killswitch]

Hello all,

I am working on a small CMS application.  I have thus far avoided using any realy templating architecture (Smarty, PatTemplate, etc) and stuck with just including three files.

 

It uses MySQL database and so far is coded to work with php 4 and 5 (have yet to use any classes, will get into it later).  I am stuck at the moment on something that probably has a relatively simple solution, but I am new to developing any large scale application such as a CMS.

 

I can add, edit, delete content, place them in categories and sections (similar to Drupals page and node I guess), etc at this point in time.  Now for the problem... I want to be able and have new menus appear or disappear depending on which section I am in and really dont know the best way to go about doing this (I dont want to overkill the application and dont want to overcode something if there is a simple way to do this). 

 

For example, if I have a products link in my main menu, which appears on every page of the site, when you follow it, I want a new menu to appear that contains links to different products or content.  The url would be something like index.php?id=2&sid=5&cid=7... etc etc etc.

 

Any ideas on the simplest way to go about doing this?  I will later be setting it so that I can choose from the backend whether I want each menu to the right or left side of my site, but dont really know how I want to go about doing this.

 

Thanks for any help freaks Happy coding.

[mbtaylor]

My CMS architecture stores menus in a table. Each menu has a menuID and a related pageID. When displaying a page from the site, I lookup which page it is displaying (by the url matching it the the pageID) which then gives me which menu to show.

 

In my menus table is a parent > child relationship. Some menus are children of the parent menu. This defines the menu heirachy. I use a recursive function to create the menus, looping through parent and child etc till all elements have been outputted.

 

Design your database efficiently first, and your application will design itself

[Killswitch]

Design your database efficiently first, and your application will design itself

 

Thanks, great advice.  I as well want my menus in the database, and figured I would end up looping them through an array, but wasnt really sure if it would be too efficient.  I know my menus will relate to the section rather than the pages, so I figured I would link them to that. 

 

I only have a bit over a years worth of coding experience, never really dealt with this before (have used associative arrays for something similar before), so I am kinda just jumping into any logical way I can see.  Thanks for sharing, will continue to build and see what happens.