How to display navigation links ONLY if the page has content...

[john8m]

Hi all,

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, I did look but wasn't sure what to search for.

I need some advice: I have a dynamic navigation menu linking to county pages for the uk(a shop directory). The thing is, some counties do not have content, so I only want to display links for counties that DO have content.

• The content (shop details) is in a table called SHOPS

• The navigation is in a table called COUNTIES

• There is also a table called COUNTRIES

Each link links to shop.php?county=CountyName

The navigation menu generates 4 headings, then below each lists all counties for that country, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland etc.

Ive used an INNER JOIN and everything works fine but I cant seem to figure out how to stop it from displaying links to pages that have no content yet.

I'm sure this can be done with a mySql JOIN somehow? I'm just pretty new to JOINS, never really used them until recently and im struggling a bit here!

Well, I thought about a quick and dirty fix for now, adding a column to COUNTIES called 'display' then set it to either 0 or 1 but this just seems like going backwards.

Also, id like to display the number of results for that county in the link. (eg London (23), Kent (12) )

The main reason for wanting to remove the links is because I recently added lots of new counties to the site - problem was some of the new counties didn't have any content yet so the site got kicked off Google! ( penalised for doorway pages or duplicate content )

Any help or ideas would be great.

[NogDog]

Hard to say for sure based on that info, but maybe part of the where clause in your query could check the "content" field (whatever it's called) to verify that it is neither null nor empty.

. . . WHERE LENGTH(field_name) > 0 . . .

[john8m]

Thank you for your reply, I'll give that a try.

[john8m]

I think I have figured it out:

SELECT DISTINCT
    county_name 
FROM
    counties
INNER JOIN
    shops
ON
    shops.county_id=counties.county_id

This seems to return exactly what I was after; a list of county names, the inner join excludes counties with no shops, and using DISTINCT removes duplicates.

John 🙂