Separating MySQL content via PHP on a "per-country/user preference" basis - php

Question

Okay, I'll lay this out simply:
I have one database that has content in it but I need to set up a conditon where if the user has selected Britain instead of the U.S. or vice versa -- some content will not show. This condition can be applied via a checkbox in the backend like so.
"Hello, I'm a paragraph" show in [x] Britian [x] U.S.
I'm not looking into actual IP Addresses or anything of that sort as the site will simply redirect to root/uk or root/us subfolders upon the user's selection on the index page. What kind of a unique parameter would I have incorporate in the db or php?
Thank You!

Answer 1

Add a column in the database display_content, make it a EMUN and set the values to 'britain','usa','all' then make the adjustments in your code to check for Britain/USA. you can either choose to display all, Britain or USA.

Answer 2

That's an interesting problem. Because although it's language oriented, it's not actually I18N related - you're talking about deny access to content based on a language preference, not displaying localized content.
Here's one idea: use a permission model
Create two permissions such as "read-enUS-content" and "read-enGB-content"
Based on the user's selection, grant them the correct permission for the length of their session (which you can persist if you wish via cookies or user prefs)
It would then be the responsibility of the application to allow/deny the content based on their permissions.
Then the question becomes, how do you connect content to permissions? There are a multitude of ways, but one approach is a bitmask column.
00
||
|+--- Read enUS bit
+---- Read enGB bit
Which might look like this when implemented
Articles
+----+---------+-----------------+
| id | content | read_perm_level |
+----+---------+-----------------+
| 1 | foo | 1 |
| 2 | bar | 2 |
| 3 | baz | 3 |
+----+---------+-----------------+
This means that 'foo' is only readable by enUS, 'bar' is only readable by enGB, and 'baz' is readable by all.
But you could also do a full permission's table and connect the content to it that way.

Answer 3

The most straightforward model for this would be an associative table in your database. You'd thus have:
paragraphs (paragraph_id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, paragraph_text TEXT, ...) ENGINE=InnoDB;
paragraph_countries (paragraph_id INT UNSIGNED, country_code CHAR(2)) ENGINE=Innodb;
When saving the paragraph settings, perform these steps:
BEGIN WORK (to start a transaction)
DELETE FROM paragraph_countries WHERE paragraph_id = ...
(foreach checked country): INSERT INTO paragraph_countries (...)
COMMIT (to commit the transaction)
To select paragraphs relevant to the current country, simply JOIN to the associated table with the appropriate country code.