Incorporating PHP into business directory!!

slimboyfatz32

Hi all , welcome to my first posting !!

I am currently putting together a (small) business directory (well at the moment anyway!) there is a test page here

http://www.silktownbusinesses.com/index_test.html

even though the site has only a few businesses to add (and i could stick to just .html pages) i would really like to incorporate PHP into it for future use!

i.e; on business type listings - (example) Click on Accountancy then sub categories appear , which when clicked on would list all companies in that sub-category (database driven basically)...

any help much appreciated🙂

bpat1434

Okay, so I see 3 tables right off the bat:

1.) business
2.) category
3.) biz_to_cat

The business table would be filled with each business's information like name, address, contact info, etc. The category table would be filled with the name of categories. Now, to deal with subcategories, we'd have a "parentID" field where the ID of the category that the subcategory is under is that value. For example:
- Accountancy
-- Some Sub Category

For that example, we'd have the following:

id  |  parentID  |  title
1   |  0         |  Accountancy
2   |  1         |  Some Sub Category

So each top-level category will have a parentID of "0", and each subcategory will have a parentID of the value of the id of the parent's category.

The third table is a simple relationship table that links the business table to the category table. This isn't entirely necessary; however, it can make things easier to look-up and make things faster eventually. Essentially the table is nothing more than 3 columns, each with numbers in them:

id  |  bizID  |  catID
1   |  1      |  1
2   |  9      |  2

So then the business with id "1" would be in the Accountancy category (but not in the sub-categories). The business with id "9" would be in the sub-category "Some Sub Category" of the Accountancy category, as well as it would be a part of the Accountancy category.

Hope that helps.

slimboyfatz32

thanks for the reply brett , but as you may have guessed i am bit of a noob to PHP , XHTML and CSS have been my bag upto now!!

How would i go about the actual code etc... to incorporate this into my site??

many thanks

bpat1434

Read some tutorials on PHP and MySQL integration. Try writing a few scripts to do what you want want without integrating first. This will make it easier for you to make sure things work first 😉

You'll need to use [man]mysql_connect/man and [man]mysql_select_db/man to be ready to use the MySQL database with your site. From there, you'd have to use [man]mysql_query/man to query for a result from the database, and typically [man]mysql_fetch_array/man inside of a [man]while/man loop to iterate over every row returned in the result set.

That should be enough to start you on your way. As for integrating it into the site, you can use links and send certain values through the URL like:
somepage.php?category=Accountancy

Then on that next page, you'd run queries for all subcategories and any businesses in the Accountancy category. You'd display the subcategories as links like:
somepage.php?subcat=SomeCategory

Then from there you'd run a query for all businesses in that subcategory....