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PHP

Posted by Philip Harper
Philip Harper
10,033 Points

Arrays, Links and Page organisation in PHP

Hi all, so I'm working on a self-initiated project—mainly to help understand and learn about our mutual web friend, PHP.

My question is about Arrays, and web page organisation. I have a list of 200 museum pages, which fall into "Subject Category" AND "Admission Type" AND "London Area" — each museum page will be accessible from each of those navigational menu items, as they are attributes of the museum, for example, The British Museum is "Subject Category = Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Child Friendly, Decorative Arts + Design" AND "Admission Type = Free" AND "London Area = Central" — so you can see how one museum spans across these three main sections, if you like.

So,

I'm a bit confused about how to organise the arrays to organise them, I was thinking something like...

$categories = array ( 'Archaeology' => '<a href="../categories/archaeology-museums-london.php">Archaeology</a>', 'Architecture' => '<a href="../categories/architecture-museums-london.php">Architecture</a>');

// etc

Then drilling down into subject array, museum name equals museum link, like thus...

$archaeology = array ( 'Whatever Museum' => 'a href="../categories/archaeology-museums-london.php');

// etc

But then, I'm going to get alot of code repetition o of museum name as the same process would be repeated with "London Area" and "Admission Type" — I'm confused... whats about the best, practical and maintainable way of organising these museum pages into categories.

I hope that's clear and not confusing in the question?

2 Answers

Rebecca Vonada
Rebecca Vonada
5,274 Points

If I'm reading your concerns correctly, you might be able to get away with this by making the museum your index and using multidimensional arrays, so:

$museums = array(
   [Museum_1] => array(
      'Category' => 'Art',
      'Link' => 'http://linkstuff.com/',
     'AdmissionType' => 'Free'
    );
   [Museum_2] => array(
      'Category' => 'Not Art',
      'Link' => 'http://linkotherstuff.com/',
      'AdmissionType' => 'Not Free'
    );
);

Now to access those, you could then iterate through the list, so:

foreach ($museums as $museum) {
  if ($museum['Category'] == 'Art') {
    // Do something with the museums that are art
  }
}

If you have that much data, though, you might be better off storing the museum information in a database (SQL's an easy go-to and if you use phpMyAdmin you can import from CSV for easy database creation). It would save you iterating through a giant array multiple times when you needed to get collections.

Philip Harper
Philip Harper
10,033 Points
Philip Harper
Philip Harper
10,033 Points

Rebecca!

Thanks so much for your reply / answer! You've explained it really well and to be honest, inspired me. I need to hurry up and get on to the course "Enhancing a Simple PHP Application" — I think MySQL databases are covered there.

Thanks again, really appreciate it.