Table field names should all be lowercase and use underscore word separators; you
should avoid using underscores if they are not necessary. For example, you can
name an email address field as email. If you had a primary and a secondary email
field, you could call them email and email_secondary; there is no reason to name
the primary email address email_primary.
If you are using a primary key record ID, you should call the field id, make it of type
integer auto_increment, and disallow null. Doing this will allow you to use the
Joomla! framework more effectively.
Common Fields
We may use some common fields in our tables. Using these fields will enable us to
take advantage of the Joomla! framework. We will discuss how to implement and
manipulate these fields, using the JTable class, later in this chapter.
Chapter 3
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Publishing
We use publishing to determine whether to display data. Joomla! uses a special field
called published, of type tinyint(1); 0 = not published, 1 = published.
Hits
If we want to keep track of the number of times a record has been viewed, we can
use the special field hits, of type integer and with the default value 0.
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