Planning and Creating Your Administrative Menu

You could just write one script that says, "Select all my data; I don't care about the order," but that would be boring. In this chapter, you'll see four ways to select records from the my_music table. To facilitate easy navigation, create an administration menu—fancy words for "a list of links to scripts."

Open a new file in your text editor and type the following HTML:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Menu</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>My Menu</H1>
<P><strong>My Music</strong></P>

Start a bulleted list, and create the first link to a script called sel_byid.php. This script will display the records ordered by ID number:
```
<ul>
<li><a href="sel_byid.php">ordered by ID</a>
```
Add a link to a script called sel_bydateacq.php. This script will display the records ordered by date acquired. The most recently acquired item is listed first:
```
<li><a href="sel_bydateacq.php">ordered by date acquired</a>
   (most recent first)
```
Add a link to a script called sel_bytitle.php. This script will display the records ordered by title:
```
<li><a href="sel_bytitle.php">ordered by title</a>
```
Add a link to a script called sel_byartist.php. This script will display the records ordered by artist:
```
<li><a href="sel_byartist.php">ordered by artist</a>
```
Close the bulleted list, and then add some HTML so that the document is valid:
```
</ul>
</HTML>
```
Save the file with the name my_menu.html, and place this file in the document root of your web server.
Open your web browser and type http://127.0.0.1/my_menu.html.

In the next sections, you create the scripts that do all the aforementioned selecting.