What are some best practices for structuring and organizing categories and subcategories in a PHP application?

When structuring and organizing categories and subcategories in a PHP application, it is important to maintain a clear and logical hierarchy to make it easier for users to navigate through the content. One best practice is to use a database table to store the categories and subcategories, with each category having a parent category ID to establish the relationship between them. Additionally, using recursive functions to retrieve and display nested categories can help simplify the code and make it more scalable. 

// Sample code to retrieve and display nested categories using recursive function

function displayCategories($parent_id = 0, $level = 0) {
    // Retrieve categories with the given parent_id from the database
    $categories = getCategoriesByParentId($parent_id);
    
    // Loop through each category and display its name with proper indentation based on the level
    foreach ($categories as $category) {
        echo str_repeat('-', $level) . $category['name'] . "\n";
        
        // Recursively call the function to display subcategories
        displayCategories($category['id'], $level + 1);
    }
}

// Function to get categories by parent ID from the database
function getCategoriesByParentId($parent_id) {
    // Implement database query to retrieve categories with the given parent_id
    // Return the result as an array of category data
}

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