Adding a graphical display of vendor locations

Question

Sorry this is going to be long winded !! I'm looking for some direction here on how to accomplish some graphical effectson rovements to a web page.
I have a website for an airshow where multiple (50+) vendors will each have booths (10ft x 10ft). Some vendors will have two booths adjacent to each other. Vendors already apply online and their info is stored in a single MySQL table with an additional text column showing the booth number assigned by the airshow administrator. I made this a text column so the administrator can enter for example booth number "27" for a single booth or booth numbers "27 & 28" or "27, 28" for multiple booths.
My initial idea was just to display an static image of the vendor area with booth numbers on it and below it to display two tables, one showing vendor names with the booth number assigned and a second showing the same info but in booth number order. I know how to do this using recordsets sorted by vendor name and booth number) and this approach is probably adequate. So, I thought I should try and improve it !!
First improvement would be to add a rollover effect so moving the mouse over the vendor area image would cause a pop-up to display the vendor name. Can I use dynamic data in the pop-up box and if so will I have to use a spry dataset to get an adequate response time, or does PHP cause all the pop-ups to be loaded when the page loads? Also, how would I address the issue of vendors with two, or possible more, booths. Each vendor only has one entry in the vendor table with multiple booth numbers in the text location field.
Second improvement would be to give the airshow administrator the ability to assign a vendor to a booth by clicking on a booth on the image of the vendor area.
My gut tells me either of these will be challenging for a neophyte like me doing this on a volunteer basis, but if there's a simple way of doing it I'd like to try.
Thanks for reading this far and for any suggestions.
Tony

Answer 1

how would I address the issue of vendors with two, or possible more, booths. Each vendor only has one entry in the vendor table with multiple booth numbers in the text location field.
Use two tables (one for users, one for vendor tables) with JOIN argument to join multiple vendor tables for one vendor based off unique ID of vendor.
TABLE1_users:
id, name, email, phone, etc.
TABLE2_tables
id, user_id, table_number, table_img, table_img_rollover
With image 1 and image 2 location stored in db you can use any rollover script you want and simply replace image1.jpg with phpvariable_for_image1.jpg and image2.jpg with phpvariable_for_image2.jpg, respectively.