What best practices should be followed when creating dynamic navigation menus in PHP to ensure proper functionality and structure?

When creating dynamic navigation menus in PHP, it is important to separate the logic from the presentation to ensure proper functionality and structure. This can be achieved by using a database to store the menu items and their corresponding URLs, and then dynamically generating the menu HTML based on the data retrieved from the database.

// Sample code to dynamically generate a navigation menu in PHP

// Connect to the database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=your_database', 'username', 'password');

// Query to retrieve menu items from the database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM menu_items');
$stmt->execute();
$menuItems = $stmt->fetchAll();

// Output the navigation menu
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($menuItems as $menuItem) {
    echo '<li><a href="' . $menuItem['url'] . '">' . $menuItem['title'] . '</a></li>';
}
echo '</ul>';