There are lots of examples online teaching you what is MVC, why it is good and how to develop an application using this pattern. However most of them use a predefined structure with already constructed database and only the connection between a database table and a model is described. Actually what happens before all this. The client tells you something he’d like to have in his application.

Just imagine the following situation. You’ve a client who tells you that he wants a blog. The blog has to have posts and users, and every user must write posts and every post must have comments. Also he wants a set of categories where each post will be attached to one ore more categories. And finally a blogroll – one ore more links to another blogs.

This is pretty general and does not pretend to be a full featured example. However the strategy to make a primary structure of the future models is to pickup the nouns in this paragraph. It is really simple:

The blog has to have posts and users, and every user must write posts and every post must have comments. Also he wants a set of categories where each post will be attached to one or more categories. And finally a blogroll – one ore more links to another blogs.

So far you can see there are five prototypes of database tables: post, user, comment, category and link.

It’s important to note that not every noun is ready to be a database table. In some cases, when the client is really smart, he can give you a more detailed description. Than there are nouns describing the other nouns, of course, they are supposed to be columns to those tables.

Every post must have title and description …

This is what we can do for now. From a raw text you can design your database and models in the MVC architecture.