Advanced User-Customised Content Support

In the last article we took a look at how we could make a very simple system to display content in categories that the user is interested in. By default, the user sees everything, but can amend  their preferences to select categories that (s)he does not wish to see.

The only drawback to this system was that we could only classify an article under a single category or topic, thereby having to create over-generalised topics so that we could accurately classify the articles.  So instead of having topics for Linux, Windows and Macintosh OS X, we had to have a catch-all category of Operating Systems, in case an article covered more than one type of operating system.

In today's article we'll alter the structure of our database and change the admin pages so that we can give an article more than one topic.  We'll then take a look at how this affects the code that we wrote to display the articles on the main page.