As part of the PHP/MySQL Content Management System which I'm constructing I have an article table which houses all of my articles and all of its components such as images etc. In addition to this I have a pages table which contains the content for all articles which have more than one page. I have a feeling that my table design isn't as good as it could be. Could anyone suggest improvements to what I have below please?

For instance at the moment I have the first page of the article in article table because most articles only have one page. The rest of the article's pages are in the pages table, is this a mistake?

article Table
Fields
article_id
writer
subject
headline
subheading
keywords
description
article_text
picture1
picture2
picture3
created
modified
published

pages Table
page_id
article_id
pagenum
pagetitle
pagecontent

no, it's not a mistake, but it's more complicated than it needs to be

use just one table, and have page 2 link to page 1

of course, this begs the question of whether there needs to be a page 2 in the first place

i would let the front end decide where to split an article into pages

might have a totally different cutoff point for smaller devices, for example

I think I understand what you mean. But if I had, for example, all the 4 pages of the article in the article table I may have a problem with the article_id field because at the moment it is the primary key of the article table.

Doesn't the first part of your suggestion mean that with each page of the article, the article_id would have to have the same value. Is there a good way to get around this?

Do you intend for this to be a "flat" table? It seems to me that list tables might be helpful. For example, a KeyWord table that can be linked to your article table via an intermediary table. Perhaps the same with authors (if there is more than one author per article).

well, like i said earlier (and i repeat for emphasis now), it might be a better idea not to have "pages" at all, just articles -- one article, one row -- then your front end could decide where to split an article into pages

but if you must have pages, yes, then the combination (article_id,page_no) would be the primary key